Other forms: straws
A straw is the thin tube you drink through. A paper straw, drink through a straw, the last straw.
The other sense is the material: straw is the dried stalks left after grain is harvested, used for animal bedding and for thatching. That is the older meaning and the drinking tube is named after it, because the first ones were hollow stalks. Note the very common idiom the last straw, meaning the small thing that finally breaks somebody's patience, from the proverb about the straw that broke the camel's back. And clutch at straws means to try anything however hopeless.
1nounstrawA thin tube for drinking through.
“The paper straws go soggy in about a minute.”
Patterndrink through a straw · a paper / plastic / metal straw · suck on a straw · a bendy straw
2noundriedDried stalks left after grain is harvested.
“The barn was full of straw bales.”
straw is a tube, or dried stalks.
The old word means what is spread about: dry grass spread on a farm floor. The first drinking straws were real pieces of it.
hooks ontospread
Old English streaw comes from a root meaning to strew or scatter — the same root as strew and street, which is a paved way. Straw is the stuff that gets scattered on the floor, named for what is done with it.
Proto-Indo-European
*strew- — to spread, strew
Proto-Germanic
*strawą — that which is strewn, straw
Proto-West Germanic
*strau
Old English
strēaw
Middle English
straugh
English, today
straw
Built from
From Middle English straugh, strauȝ, straw, strawe, strea, streuw, from Old English strēaw, strēow, from Proto-West Germanic strau, from Proto-Germanic strawą (“that which is strewn, straw”), from Proto-Indo-European strew- (“to spread, strew”), from sterh₃- (“to extend, spread”), from ster- (“barren, infertile”). 2 Cognate with Scots strae (“straw”), yol stre, strew (“straw”), stq Sträi (“straw”), Dutch stro (“straw”), German Stroh (“straw”), lb Stréi (“straw”), wym śtruf, śtruw, štrūv (“straw”), Yiddish שטרוי (“straw”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish strå (“straw”), Icelandic strá (“straw”); also kw stras (“flat valley; lowland”), Irish and Scottish Gaelic srath (“bottom, holm; river valley”), Welsh ystrad (“valley”), Latin struo (“place one thing on top of another; to build, compose; to devise, ready; to arrange, place; to head up”), Greek στρώμα (“mattress; layer, sheet”), Albanian shtrij (“to stretch; to lay; to run fast”), shtroj (“to scatter, spread”), be старана́ (“side; country”), Bulgarian and mk страна́ (“side; country”), Czech and Slovak strana (“side; page; party”), csb and Polish strona (“side; page; party; country”), Russian сторона́ (“side; country”), страна́ (“country”), Serbo-Croatian стра́на, strána (“side; page”), Slovene stran (“side; page”), Armenian ստերջ (“barren, sterile”), Persian گستردن (“to extend, spread”), Sanskrit स्तृ, स्तॄ (“to scatter, spread”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA