trod

Formstrods, trodding, trodded

Pluraltrods

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past of tread.

   The workers trod the grapes in wooden vats, just as their grandparents had.

   He trod lightly around the subject of money, knowing how touchy his father was.

   Note

   Tread makes its past by changing the vowel, the way get gives got: the workers trod the grapes, he trod lightly around the subject of money. The same spelling begins the regular verb for plodding, with forms like trodded of its own, and names a moorland path, so the sentence around it decides which word you are reading.

2. 2
   verb

   To tread, or to walk heavily and laboriously.

   And avoid trodding on the inevitably wet soil around the base of the shrubs as you work.

   2009, Sonia Day, “Nip that gardening zeal in the bud”

   It renders the paths, and the banks of the bayous in that region almost impassable in autumn, until the cattle have trodded it down.

   1833, Timothy Flint, The history and geography of the Mississippi Valley

   Similartrudge, plod, tramp

   Note

   This verb grew out of trod itself, once the Middle English past participle of treden, and took regular endings of its own: trods, trodding, trodded. It leans toward heavy, laborious walking. It turns up only here and there in nineteenth-century print (Timothy Flint's cattle have "trodded it down"), and these forms read as nonstandard today; in careful writing, tread, trod and trodden are the safe choice.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A track or path along which people or animals travel.

   The walkers left the road and picked up a flagged trod that ran between the two villages.

   Old packhorse trods still cross the moors, their paving stones hollowed by centuries of hooves.

   Similartrack, path, trail, footpath

   Note

   A path named for the feet that made it: Old English trodu, "track, trace," from the same source as tread. The word survives on the North York Moors, where Alan Staniforth's Cleveland Way describes the stone trods, or pannierways, that date from the medieval period. It counts like any path, so walkers follow a trod or cross several trods.

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