Other forms: mowing, mowed, mows
To mow is to cut grass short with a blade or a machine. Saturday morning, the mower dragged out of the shed, stripes running up and down the lawn, and the smell of cut grass over the whole street.
You mow a lawn, a field, a verge, a meadow of hay. The past participle is mown, which survives in newly mown grass and a mown field, though mowed is fine too. The machine is a mower and the job is mowing. The one to watch is mow down: to knock people over or kill them in numbers, by gunfire or by a car that came round the corner too fast. And mow only ever cuts things growing in a mass — you mow grass and corn, you do not mow your hair.
1verbmowTo cut grass, hay or corn down level, with a blade or a machine.
“He mows the lawn every Saturday, whether it needs it or not.”
2verbknockTo knock down or kill a lot of people at once, the way gunfire or a speeding car does.
“The car mounted the pavement and mowed down two people waiting at the stop.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Mow has been in English as long as English has had fields. It runs from Old English mawan through Proto-Germanic *meaną back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to mow or reap — the same root behind Latin meto, to harvest, and German mähen. People were saying a version of this word about this exact job thousands of years before anyone owned a lawn.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₂meh₁- — to mow, reap
Proto-Germanic
*mēaną
Proto-West Germanic
*māan
Old English
māwan
Middle English
mowen
English, today
mow
From Middle English mowen (participle mowen), from Old English māwan (past tense mēow, past participle māwen), from Proto-West Germanic māan, from Proto-Germanic mēaną, from Proto-Indo-European h₂meh₁- (“to mow, reap”). Cognate with stq mjo (“to mow”), Dutch maaien (“to mow”), German mähen (“to mow”), lb méien (“to mow”), Danish meje (“to mow”), Swedish meja (“to mow”); see also hit (“spring/early summer”) literally “mowing time”, Latin metō (“to harvest, mow”), Ancient Greek ἀμάω (“to mow”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA