Other forms: drones, droning
A drone is a flying machine with nobody in it, steered from the ground or following a route somebody typed in. Four small propellers, a camera slung underneath, hanging over a field or a wedding and making a noise like a wasp in a jar.
That noise is the other half of the word. To drone is to make one low flat sound that never lets up: a fan drones, an engine drones, and a man who drones on has been talking in the same tone for twenty minutes with no sign of stopping. In music a drone is a single held note under the tune, the sound bagpipes make. The oldest drone of all is a bee — the male, who does no work in the hive — which is why calling a person a drone has never been a compliment.
1noundroneAn aircraft with nobody on board, flown from the ground.~75%
“A drone hung over the field taking pictures of the crop.”
synonyms: unmanned aircraft
2verbsoundTo make a low, flat sound that goes on and on.~2%
“The fan drones all night in the room above.”
3nounmaleA male bee, which does no work in the hive.~3%
“The workers drive the drones out at the end of summer.”
4nounsingleA single low note held underneath a tune.~20%
“The drone carries on while the melody changes above it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 157 sentences found in the wild and placed 152 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
DRONE → DROWN
A grey box with four small wings hangs over the pool, humming one note. Then it tips, falls in, and you watch it drown — the humming going down under the water and stopping all at once.
hooks ontodrown
Two separate old words landed on the same spelling. The bee is Old English drān, from *dʰreh₁n-, a root that meant bee, drone, hornet. The sound has nothing to do with it — Middle English drounen, to roar or bellow, from *dʰer-, to roar, hum, drone. Between them they now cover an insect, a noise, and a machine that makes one.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰreh₁n- — bee, drone, hornet
Proto-Germanic
*drenô
Proto-West Germanic
*drānu
Old English
drān
Middle English
drane
English, today
drone
Built from
From Middle English drane, dron, drone, from Old English drān, drǣn, from Proto-West Germanic drānu, from Proto-Germanic drenô, drēnuz (“drone”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰreh₁n- (“bee, drone, hornet”). 2 Cognate with stq Droane (“drone”), Dutch dar (“drone”), German Drohne (“drone”), li dreen, Droon (“drone”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk drone (“drone”), Swedish drönare (“drone”); also be тру́цень (“drone”), Bulgarian търтей (“drone”), Czech trubec (“drone”), mk трут (“drone”), Polish trąd, trut, truteń (“drone”), Russian and Ukrainian тру́тень (“drone”), Serbo-Croatian тру̑т, trȗt (“drone”), Slovak trúd (“drone”), Slovene trot (“drone”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA