Other forms: bows, bowed, bowing
Bow is two words sharing one spelling, and the sound tells you which. Rhyme it with go and it is the thing that shoots arrows, the knot in a shoelace, the stick a violinist draws across the strings. Rhyme it with now and it is what the cast does at the end of a play: bend forward from the waist while the audience claps.
The two sounds keep their own meanings and never trade. The go one is tied or curved — you tie your laces in a bow, you put a bow on a present, a man wears a bow tie, an archer draws a bow. The now one is bent — actors bow, waiters bow, you bow to the queen, and a ship's bow is its front end, the part that cuts the water. Bow to also works away from bodies: bow to pressure means give in. And take a bow is what you say to somebody who has just done something well.
1verbbowTo bend the top half of your body forward, as a greeting or to thank an audience. Said like now.~27%
“The dancers bowed and the curtain came down.”
synonyms: bend forward, stoop
2nounknotA knot with two loops, tied in a ribbon or a shoelace. Said like go.~16%
“She tied the ribbon in a neat bow.”
3nouncurvedA curved length of wood strung tight, used to shoot arrows. Said like go.~52%
“He drew the bow and let the arrow fly.”
4nounstickA stick strung with horsehair, drawn across the strings of a violin. Said like go.~5%
“Her bow moved so fast you could hardly see it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 155 sentences found in the wild and placed 67 of them on a sense (88 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Two of the three bows are one word. Old English boga, the arch, and būgan, to bend, both run back to *bʰewgʰ-, to bend — which is what an archer's bow is, a bent stick, and what your back does when you bow. The ship's bow is an outsider: it came in from Low German and Dutch, from a root meaning arm, and it is the same word as the bough of a tree.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰewgʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*bugô
Proto-West Germanic
*bogō
Old English
boga
Middle English
bowe
English, today
bow
From Middle English bowe, from Old English boga, Proto-West Germanic bogō, from Proto-Germanic bugô. 2 Cognate with stq Booge (“arch, bow, curve”), West Frisian bôge (“arc, arch, bow”), Dutch boog (“arc, arch, bow”), German Bogen (“arc, arch, bow, curve”), lb Bou (“arc, arch, bow, curve”), wym böga (“arc, arch, bend, bow, curve”), Yiddish בויגן (“arc, arch, bow, curve”), Danish bue (“arc, arch, bow, curve”), Faroese and Icelandic bogi (“arch, bow, vault”), gmq-jmk buga (“bow”), Norwegian Bokmål bue (“arc, arch, bow”), Norwegian Nynorsk boge (“arc, arch, bow”), Swedish båge (“bow”), gme-cgo boga (“bow”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA