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fallow

UK/ˈfæləʊ/US/ˈfæloʊ/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,074 of 15,258leans written

Fallow means left unplanted for a season so the soil can rest. Lie fallow, a fallow field, leave the ground fallow.

Medieval farming turned on it: a third of the land lay fallow each year to recover nitrogen, until clover and crop rotation made that waste unnecessary. Figuratively a fallow period is a stretch of no output, and it implies recovery rather than failure.

Nigel Chadwick · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of fallow

  1. 1adjectivefallowLeft unplanted for a season so the soil can rest.C1

    “The farmer left the field fallow for a year to let the soil recover.”

fallow is a state of land.

Where it comes from

Old English fealh meant ploughed land. The colour word fallow, a pale brown, is a different and older word.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *polḱéh₂ — arable land

  2. Proto-West Germanic

    *falgu

  3. Old English

    fealh

  4. Middle English

    falwe

  5. English, today

    fallow

Built from

  • fealg · Old English — fallow land

From Middle English falwe, from Old English fealh, fealg (“fallow land”), from Proto-West Germanic falgu (compare stq Falge, West Frisian falig, felling, Dutch valg, German Felge), from Proto-Indo-European polḱéh₂ (“arable land”) (compare cel-gau olca, Russian полоса́).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Farm & Countryside

Practise this word

fallow in the wild

  • The period of time during which the field is cultivated is usually shorter than the period over which the land is allowed to regenerate by lying fallow.

    Shifting cultivation

  • Sometimes no slashing at all is needed where regrowth is purely of grasses, an outcome not uncommon when soils are near exhaustion and need to lie fallow.

    Shifting cultivation

  • The European fallow deer (Dama dama), also known as the common fallow deer or simply fallow deer, is a species of deer native to Eurasia.

    European fallow deer

  • Crop rotation systems typically called for some of a farmer's fields to be left fallow each year.

    Fallow

  • The fallow fields would overgrow with weeds which were used for grazing farm animals.

    Three-field system

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.