plough

UK/plaʊ/US/plaʊ/

verbB1+Common in everyday speech and writing · #8,094 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: ploughing, ploughs, ploughed

To plough is to turn the soil over before sowing. Plough the field, ploughed land, plough it in.

Turning the soil buries weeds and warms the ground and also breaks its structure and releases carbon, which is why no-till farming has grown. This is the British spelling; American writing has plow. To plough on means to keep going regardless.

Definitions of plough

1verbploughTo turn the soil over before sowing.B1+
“The farmer ploughed the field in spring before sowing the wheat.”

plough is a turning of soil.

Also accepted in games: plow

Where it comes from

Old English ploh meant a measure of land, and Old Norse plogr the implement. The two senses merged in English.

Proto-Germanic
*plōgaz
Old Norse
plógr — plough (the implement)
Old English
plōh — hide of land, ploughland
Middle English
plouh
English, today
plough

Built from

*plōguz · Proto-Germanic — plough

From Middle English plouh, plow, plugh, plough, plouw, from Old English plōh (“hide of land, ploughland”) and Old Norse plógr (“plough (the implement)”), both from Proto-Germanic plōgaz, plōguz (“plough”). Cognate with Scots pleuch, frr plog, West Frisian ploech, Low German Ploog, Dutch ploeg, Russian плуг, German Pflug, Danish plov, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish plog, Icelandic plógur. Replaced Old English sulh (“plough, furrow”); see sullow.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Farm & Countryside

Practise this word

plough in the wild

A plough or plow (US) (both pronounced ) is a farm tool for loosening or turning soil before sowing seed or planting.
Plough
Ploughs were traditionally drawn by oxen and horses but modern ploughs are drawn by tractors.
Plough
The carucate or carrucate was a medieval unit of land area approximating the land a plough team of eight oxen could till in a single annual season.
Carucate
According to legend, Burns was ploughing in the fields at his Mossgiel Farm and accidentally destroyed a mouse's nest, which it needed to survive the winter.
To a Mouse
Burns's brother, Gilbert, claimed that the poet composed the poem while still holding his plough.
To a Mouse

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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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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