Meadow

How to spell meadow

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce meadow

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does meadow mean?

1. nounA field of grass and wild flowers, often used for hay or grazing.

Meadow in a sentence

• The cottage looked out over a wide meadow full of buttercups.

• The farmer cut the meadow for hay in late June.

Where does meadow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Meadow comes from the Old English mædwe, which was the inflected form of mæd, meaning a piece of grassland that was mown for hay. That noun grew from the same Germanic root as the verb 'to mow', so a meadow was literally land kept for mowing rather than for grazing. The two forms mæd and mædwe eventually split into separate English words: the shorter one survives in place names like 'Runnymede', while the longer one became the everyday 'meadow' we use today. The spelling preserves the old 'ea' vowel and the historic 'dwe' ending, now softened to '-dow', which is why the word looks less phonetic than it sounds. Because it descends straight from Anglo-Saxon farming vocabulary, meadow has been part of English for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• mead- (from Old English mæd, mowing/grassland)
• -ow (from the oblique form mædwe)