Other forms: rowing, rows, rowed
A row is a line of things or people side by side. Seats in a theatre, houses along a street, onions planted straight across the vegetable patch, a row of teeth.
In a table or a spreadsheet, rows run across and columns run down. In a row means one after another with nothing in between: three wins in a row, four days in a row. There is also a verb, said like go, meaning to move a boat by pulling on oars, which gives us rowing boats and the rowing machine nobody uses at the gym. And there is a completely separate word spelled the same but said like cow: a row is a loud argument. They had a row about money and did not speak for a week.
1nounrowA number of people or things arranged in a straight line side by side.~94%
“They sat in the front row and could see the actors sweating.”
synonyms: line, rank
2nounboxesA line of boxes running across a table or spreadsheet.~2%
“Put the dates in the top row and the totals down the side.”
3verbmoveTo move a boat through water by pulling oars.~2%
“We rowed across to the island and back before lunch.”
4nounquarrelA noisy quarrel or argument. Said to rhyme with cow.~2%
“The neighbours had a row loud enough to hear through the wall.”
synonyms: quarrel, argument
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
row is a line of things.
The line-shaped row is native English: Old English rǣw, from Proto-Germanic raiwō, a row, streak or line, and behind that the Proto-Indo-European root Hreyk-, to carve, scratch or etch. A row began as a scratched line, the mark you drag across a surface. The cousins are still visible in Dutch rij and German Reihe.
Middle English
rewe
English, today
row
Built from
From Middle English rewe. From Middle English rewe, rowe, rawe, from Old English rǣw, rāw, probably from Proto-Germanic raiwō, raigwō, rīgǭ (“row, streak, line”), from Proto-Indo-European Hreyk- (“to carve, scratch, etch”). Cognate with Scots raw (“row”), dialectal Norwegian rå (“boundary line”), stq Riege (“row”), West Frisian rige (“row”), Dutch rij (“row, line”), German Low German Reeg, Riege, Rieg (“row”), German Reihe (“row”), German Riege (“sports team”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA