Plow

How to spell plow

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plow

What does plow mean?

1. nounA large farming tool with a heavy blade, used to cut and turn over soil before planting.
2. verbTo cut and turn over soil, or to push forcefully through or into something.

Plow in a sentence

• noun

  The farmer used an old plow.

• verb

  Each spring they plow the fields before sowing the wheat.

• noun

  A horse-drawn plow stood in the museum.

• verb

  The city crews plow the streets after every heavy snowfall.

Where does plow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English ploh, which originally referred to a measure of land that a team of oxen could work in a single day rather than to the implement itself. It has deep Germanic roots, with close relatives in Old Norse plogr and Old High German pfluog, all pointing back to a shared word for the farming tool. By the Middle English period the meaning had settled firmly on the device that breaks and turns the soil, and the verb sense of driving forward or breaking through followed naturally. The traditional British spelling 'plough' preserves the old 'ough' cluster, a famously unpredictable English string, while American English regularised it to the simpler, phonetic 'plow' in the nineteenth century, largely under the influence of Noah Webster's drive to streamline spelling. That reform is exactly why the same word looks so different on either side of the Atlantic, and why the short 'plow' can feel oddly bare to readers raised on 'plough'.

How the word is built

• plow (single Germanic root; no affixes; American spelling of the older British 'plough')

British and American spelling

Plow is the American spelling. British English spells it plough.