Weeds

How to spell weeds

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce weeds

What does weeds mean?

1. nounWild, unwanted plants growing where they are not wanted, especially among crops or flowers.
2. verbClears unwanted plants from a garden or bed (third person singular present).

Weeds in a sentence

• noun

  Tall weeds had taken over the abandoned flower bed.

• verb

  She weeds the borders every Sunday morning before breakfast.

• noun

  He sprayed the weeds along the gravel driveway.

• verb

  The gardener weeds around each rose bush by hand.

Where does weeds come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun 'weod', which simply meant a small herb or a wild, uncultivated plant. It belongs to the native Germanic stock of English and has no clear relatives outside the West Germanic family, so its deeper origin is somewhat obscure. Over the centuries the neutral sense of 'any plant' narrowed to the modern meaning of an unwanted plant that competes with crops or flowers. The same root also gave rise to the verb 'to weed', meaning to clear such plants away, recorded from early Middle English. A separate and now archaic sense, the 'weeds' a widow wears in mourning, comes instead from a different Old English word, 'waed', meaning a garment, so the two senses are unrelated despite sharing a spelling. The plain spelling with a double 'e' rarely troubles writers, since it follows the same pattern as 'seed', 'feed', and 'need'.

How the word is built

• weed (Old English weod: unwanted plant)
• -s (plural / third-person verb ending)