Straw

How to spell straw

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce straw

What does straw mean?

1. nounThe dried stalks of cereal plants, used for animal bedding, thatching, or packing.
2. nounA thin tube used for sucking up a drink.

Straw in a sentence

• The farmer spread fresh straw across the stable floor.

• She sipped the milkshake through a paper straw.

• Bales of straw were stacked along the edge of the field.

• The cafe switched to a reusable metal straw for every cold drink.

Where does straw come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Straw comes straight from the Old English word streaw, which meant the dried, threshed stalks of cereal plants such as wheat, barley, or oats. That word is closely related to the Old English verb streowian, meaning 'to strew' or 'to scatter', because the dry stalks were exactly what people spread across floors and stables as bedding. The same Germanic root produced very similar words in neighbouring languages, such as German Stroh and Dutch stro, so the family is genuinely ancient. The drinking-straw sense arrived much later, in the 1800s, when people sipped through a hollow stalk of actual grain straw before paper and then plastic tubes replaced it. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, with the tricky part for writers being the silent 'w' and the 'aw' vowel cluster rather than any exotic origin.

How the word is built

• straw (single root from Old English streaw, dried stalks); no affixes