tills

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of till.

   Managers reconcile the tills against the day's sales receipts.

   The manager found twenty dollars missing from one of the tills.

   Note

   The plural carries every money sense of the singular: the registers themselves, the removable boxes inside them, a bank teller's cash drawer, or the counted contents at the end of a shift. Using till for the whole register is British. Geologists use the same noun for glacial drift of clay, sand and boulders. The spelling is shared with the present-tense verb form, so the surrounding grammar shows which is meant.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of till.

   The farmer tills his fields as soon as the frost lifts.

   A skilled gardener tills the bed to loosen compacted earth.

   Note

   The -s form serves a verb that works on soil and on minds alike. One can till fields, and one can till knowledge, virtue or the mind. Both uses normally take an object (he tills the land), though the farming sense can stand alone (she tills every spring). The preposition till, meaning 'until', never adds -s, so tills is always this verb or the cash-drawer plural.

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