Weed

How to spell weed

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce weed

What does weed mean?

1. nounA wild plant growing where it is not wanted, especially among cultivated crops or in a garden.
2. verbTo remove unwanted plants from a garden, bed, or growing area.

Weed in a sentence

• noun

  A single dandelion weed had pushed up through the patio crack.

• verb

  She likes to weed the flower beds before the morning heat sets in.

• noun

  Every weed in the vegetable bed competes with the lettuce for water.

• verb

  Volunteers agreed to weed the community allotment every Saturday.

Where does weed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Weed comes from the Old English word weod, which simply meant a herb, grass, or wild plant, with no negative judgement attached. Related forms appear across the old Germanic languages, including the Old Saxon wiod, all pointing back to a common ancestor for low-growing plants. Over the centuries the sense narrowed to the one we know today: a plant growing where it is not wanted, especially among crops or in a garden. The verb sense, meaning to clear away such plants, developed naturally from the noun. Because the word is one short native syllable spelled with the double 'ee', the main thing to remember is that the long vowel is written 'ee' rather than 'ea', unlike its near-twins like 'read' or 'bead'.

How the word is built

• weed (whole Old English root word; no affixes)

Words that sound like weed

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• we'd: Contraction of 'we would', expressing a conditional intention or preference.