tread
Verbtreads, treading, trod, trodden
Noun pluraltreads
Formstreads, treading, trod, trodden
Pluraltreads
- 1To walk or step on or across something, sometimes pressing or crushing it underfoot.
Visitors are asked not to tread on the fragile moss beside the trail.
He trod across the wet sand in his bare feet.
Note
The verb is irregular, a survivor from Old English tredan: trod in the past and trodden as the participle, though treaded also occurs. In everyday use it takes on or across (don't tread on the lawn), and Alexander Pope's fools rush in where angels fear to tread, from An Essay on Criticism (1711), became a proverb for plunging into what wiser people avoid.
- 2The grooves cut into the outer face of a tire, which give it traction.
Tires with worn tread take longer to stop on wet roads.
Thick mud was packed into the deep treads of the tractor's tires.
- 3To proceed or behave in a particular way, used with adverbs such as carefully, lightly or warily.
Diplomats are treading warily around the border dispute.
Anyone writing about the scandal will need to tread cautiously.
Note
The adverb is what makes the figure: without lightly, gently, carefully, cautiously or warily, the verb slips back into plain walking. The picture is of feet testing uncertain ground, which is why the phrases suit delicate subjects, disputes and other people's feelings, as in tread warily around a quarrel.
- 4To step or walk upon a surface, path or place.
So many visitors tread the old stone floor that it has worn smooth.
Few climbers have trodden the mountain's northern ridge.
Note
Its best-known idiom is tread the boards, to act on the stage, the boards being a theater's floor: an actor who has trodden the boards for forty years has spent a career in the theater. Otherwise the object is usually a path, a road, a floor or a route others have walked before.
- 5A single step taken with the foot.
At every tread, the frozen crust gave way beneath his feet.
Pacing the wall, the guard counted his treads from the gate to the tower.
Note
The nouns all come from the verb: Middle English tred, from treden, "to tread". As a single step it counts the way step does (at every tread, so many treads from gate to tower), and its relatives cover the way a person walks, the sound of it, and the surfaces that feet and tires press on.
- 6The grooves on the sole of a shoe or other footwear, which give it grip or traction.
Running shoes with an aggressive tread grip better on loose gravel.
She scraped the mud out of the treads of her boots before going inside.
- 7The flat surface of a step in a staircase, on which the foot is placed.
Building codes set a minimum depth for each tread in a staircase.
The old oak treads were worn into hollows by a century of feet.
Similarstep
Note
Builders pair the tread with the riser, the upright board between one tread and the next, and together they set how steep a stair feels. The front edge of a tread, which often projects a little past the riser below, is called the nosing.
- 8
- 9The sound produced by the steps of a person or thing that is walking.
Late at night she could hear the slow tread of the guard outside her door.
The steady tread of marching feet echoed down the empty street.
Note
Footsteps heard rather than seen are the point: a tread tells a listener who is coming. It usually takes a word of weight or rhythm (heavy, measured, steady), and in Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) a light, swinging step is set against the heavy creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. A way of walking can be watched; this tread is only heard.
- 10To crush something underfoot, often in contempt or hatred, or to keep down and repress people or movements.
The mob trod the flag into the dirt to show their contempt.
The regime tried to tread every protest movement into silence.
Similartrample, crush, stamp, grind
Note
The contempt is in the picture of an enemy flattened underfoot, and the verb usually takes a particle or phrase to show it: tread under, tread into the dirt, tread into silence. The King James Bible of 1611 uses it this way in the Psalms: through thy name will we tread them under that rise up against us.
- 11To beat or press something down with the feet, such as a path or loose soil.
Gardeners tread light, sandy soil to firm it before sowing seed.
Over the years, the cattle had trodden a deep path down to the river.
Note
The past participle lives on in well-trodden, first of a path beaten hard by many feet and by extension of any approach that many people have already tried. The plain verb is still at home in the garden and the field, where soil that is too light is trodden to firm it before sowing.
- 12To crush grapes underfoot as part of making wine.
Some estates in Portugal still tread their grapes in shallow stone tanks.
The winemaker believes that treading the grapes gives a gentler pressing than any machine.
Similarstomp
- 13To go through or carry out something, such as a journey or a dance, by walking, dancing, or similar movement.
She hopes to tread the entire pilgrimage route to Santiago before she turns sixty.
At the village festival, the dancers trod the steps of a centuries-old folk dance on the green.
Note
Its object is the journey or the dance itself: you tread a pilgrimage, or tread a measure, a measure being a stately dance. Shakespeare plays on both words in Love's Labour's Lost, where visitors who have measured many a mile come to tread a measure on the grass.
- 14
- 15Of a bird, especially a male, to copulate.
Once the pair began to tread, the breeder moved them into a nesting box.
Cock pigeons often bow and coo before they tread.
Note
The posture gives the sense its name: the male bird mounts by standing on the female's back. Shakespeare's spring song in Love's Labour's Lost marks the season by it, when turtles tread, and rooks and daws, the turtles being turtledoves. Without an object the verb describes the pair, or the male, mating, and it is used only of birds.
- 16In birds, the act of mating in which the male mounts the female by standing on her back.
The keeper noted each tread in the breeding log to track which eggs might be fertile.
Hens often lose feathers on their backs from repeated treads.
Similarmating
- 17Of a male bird, to copulate with another bird.
A rooster that treads the hens too roughly can strip the feathers from their backs.
Breeders keep the cock in a separate pen until it is time for him to tread the chosen hens.
Similarmount
Note
With an object the verb names the male's part: the cock treads the hen. So firmly is it the male's word that Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex can mark out an odd hen, one that crowed like a cock, by reporting that she used to try to tread her fellow hens.
- 18A bruise or abrasion on the foot or ankle of a horse caused by interfering, that is, striking its own feet together.
The farrier reshaped the gelding's shoes after finding a fresh tread on its inside fetlock.
Horses that interfere at speed often come in from a gallop with treads on their ankles.
- 19In biology, the chalaza of a bird's egg, one of the twisted strands of thick white that hold the yolk in place.
Pastry cooks strain the eggs to remove the tread, which can leave white specks in a smooth custard.
Under the microscope, the treads appeared as twisted strands of dense albumen anchoring the yolk.
Similarchalaza
Note
The strands run from the yolk toward the two ends of the egg, letting the yolk turn while keeping it near the center as the egg is moved. A prominent tread is a sign of freshness rather than of fertilization, whatever its name might suggest.
- 20In fortification, the top surface of the banquette, the raised step on which soldiers stand to fire over the parapet.
Engineers widened the tread of the banquette so two riflemen could stand side by side.
From the tread, each musketeer could fire over the parapet and duck down to reload.
Note
The logic is the same as for the flat of a stair step: the tread is the surface where the foot goes, here the top of the banquette, the raised step on the inner side of the parapet. Standing on it, a soldier could fire over the wall and then drop down into cover.
- 21A track or path along which one makes one's way.
The hunters followed an old tread through the forest until it vanished among the ferns.
And the queint Mazes in the wanton greene, For lacke of tread are vndistinguishable.
c. 1595, William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Nights Dreame”Note
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream shows the sense at work: the quaint mazes in the wanton green, for lack of tread, are undistinguishable, their paths lost because no one walks them. The sense is long obsolete; a modern writer would say track or path, and a tread today is far more likely to be the grip on a tire or the flat of a stair.
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Practice
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Origins
From Middle English treden, from Old English tredan, from Proto-West Germanic *tredan, from Proto-Germanic *trudaną.
From Middle English tred, from treden (“to tread”).