Other forms: draws, drawing, drew, drawn
To draw is to make a picture with a pen or a pencil — lines rather than paint. A child draws a house with a fat sun in the corner. An engineer draws the shape of a bridge and hands it to a builder.
Underneath that sits an older and much wider meaning: to pull. You draw the curtains, draw a card from the deck, draw money out of the bank, draw a deep breath, and a market that draws a crowd is pulling people towards it. In sport a draw is a game that finishes level — one goal each and nobody wins. Watch the forms, which are irregular: drew and drawn, never drawed. And watch the two nouns hanging off the verb, because they split the meaning cleanly between them: a drawing is the picture you made, a drawer is the thing you pull out.
1verbdrawTo make a picture using a pen, a pencil or chalk.~19%
“The little girl likes to draw pictures of her family.”
synonyms: sketch
2verbpullTo pull something towards you or out of somewhere.~51%
“She draws the curtains as soon as it gets dark.”
synonyms: pull
3nountieA game or contest that ends with both sides level.~19%
“The match ended in a draw, one goal each.”
synonyms: tie
4verbattractTo attract people or attention.~11%
“The market draws thousands of people every Saturday.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 132 sentences found in the wild and placed 125 of them on a sense (7 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Draw and drag are the same word twice over: Old English dragan meant to drag, to pull. Drawing began as pulling — a point dragged across a surface, leaving a line behind it. The noun came in from archery, Middle English draue, the action of shooting with a bow: the pull before the arrow goes.
Middle English
drawen
English, today
draw
Built from
From Middle English drawen. The verb is derived from Middle English dragen, draghen, draue, drauen, drauhen, drawe, drawen, draȝe, draȝen, draȝhenn (“to drag, pull; to draw (out); to attract; to entice, lure; to lead; to make a drawing; to move, travel; etc.”), from Old English dragan (“to drag, draw”), from Proto-West Germanic dragan (“to carry, haul”), from Proto-Germanic draganą (“to carry, draw, pull”); further etymology uncertain, often said to be from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ- (“to drag, pull, run”), but possibly from a non-Indo-European substrate root which is also the source of Latin trahō (“to pull, draw; etc.”). a doublet of drag and draught. The noun is derived from Middle English drau, draue (“action of shooting with a bow”), from drauen, drawen.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA