Other forms: yields, yielded, yielding
To yield is to stop holding out. You lean on a stuck door and it yields; the lid of the jam jar yields on the fourth try; after three weeks the company yields and pays what the nurses asked for.
The other half of the word is about producing, and it is just as common: a field yields three tonnes an acre, a savings account yields four per cent, a search of the whole house yields one earring. As a noun, the yield is the amount that comes out — crop yields, the yield on a government bond, the yield of a reaction in a chemistry lesson. It takes to in the giving-way sense: you yield to pressure, yield to temptation, yield the floor to the next speaker. On American road signs YIELD is the word British signs spell GIVE WAY. It is a formal word for giving in; in speech people say give in or back down.
1verbyieldTo give way at last to force, pressure or persuasion.~18%
“The old lock yields if you lift the handle first.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
synonyms: submit, surrender
2verbbringTo produce something — a crop, a profit, a result.~17%
“The orchard yields more fruit than we can eat.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
synonyms: produce, bring in
3nounchemistryThe amount that something produces.~61%
“This year's yield was down by a third.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
4verbvehicleTo let another vehicle go first — the word on American road signs.~4%
“Drivers must yield at the end of the slip road.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 181 sentences found in the wild and placed 177 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: give in
YIELD → a FIELD
The whole field of corn leans on the old wooden gate all summer, harder every week. One morning the wood cracks, the gate swings wide, and the crop pours out into the road.
hooks ontofield
Old English ġieldan meant to pay, and nothing else. That is the whole word: a field yields a crop the way a tenant pays rent, and an army that yields is handing over what the other side came for. The noun arrived by the same road, from Middle English ȝeld, a tax or a payment — the amount handed across.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʰeldʰ- — to pay
Proto-Germanic
*geldaną — to pay
Proto-West Germanic
*geldan — to pay
Old English
ġieldan — to pay
Middle English
yielden
English, today
yield
Built from
From Middle English yielden, yelden, ȝelden (“to yield, pay”), from Old English ġieldan (“to pay”), from Proto-West Germanic geldan (“to pay”), from Proto-Germanic geldaną (“to pay”), from Proto-Indo-European gʰeldʰ- (“to pay”). a doublet of geld. The noun is from Middle English ȝeld (“tax, payment”), from Old English ġield (“payment”), from Proto-West Germanic geld (“payment”), from Proto-Germanic geldą (“reward, gift, money”), from Proto-Indo-European gʰeldʰ- (“to pay”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA