weed
Pluralweeds
Pluralweeds
- 1A plant growing where it is not wanted, especially among cultivated crops or in a lawn.
A single weed can spread seeds across an entire lawn.
Farmers spend hours removing weeds from between the crop rows.
Note
What makes a plant a weed is its situation, not its species: onion, garlic and mustard all count when they spoil the flavor of milk, and in a tidy garden anything not in a straight line or labeled is suspect. The word descends from Old English wēod. The weeds of clothing, as in widow's weeds, are a separate word from Old English wǣd that happens to share the spelling.
- 2Cannabis, especially as a drug made from the dried leaves and flowers of the plant, typically smoked.
Several states have legalized weed for recreational use.
She grows a little weed at home for personal use.
Similarcannabis, dope, grass, herb, ganja
Note
Plant words for smoked leaves form a small family, and this is now its best-known member, alongside tobacco as "the weed". It began as slang but has settled into ordinary informal speech. In 2015 Barack Obama could joke at the Gridiron Dinner that "weed is now legal in D.C." Even so, it stays out of formal and legal writing, where cannabis is the expected word.
- 3To clear unwanted plants from a garden, lawn, or field so cultivated plants can thrive.
Volunteers weed the community plots throughout the growing season.
She spent the morning weeding the gravel driveway.
Note
A separate word from the noun, though a close relative: Old English wēodian, from a Germanic verb meaning "to uproot." The thing to notice is the object. You weed the ground, not the plants, so you weed a flower bed, a driveway or a field. An eighteenth-century farming manual already warns that the land must be weeded again once missed seedlings grow up.
- 4Tobacco, considered as something that people smoke.
Many old sailors were devoted to the weed, smoking their pipes through long voyages.
He kept a tin of the weed on the mantel for his evening pipe.
Similartobacco
Note
The definite article does the work here. Tobacco is the weed, as if there were only one leaf worth naming: an old sailor is devoted to the weed, and a tin of the weed sits on the mantel. Without the article the word slides toward its other senses, so keep the article when you mean tobacco. The tone is colloquial.
- 5Something useless, unprofitable, or troublesome; a thing of no value.
The committee treated the outdated rule as a weed to be uprooted.
Among all his ventures, that one was a weed that yielded nothing.
- 6A puny or feeble person; someone with little physical strength.
The other boys teased him for being a weed who couldn't climb the rope.
She refused to be seen as a weed and took up weightlifting.
Note
The same picture as the weak horse: something that has grown up thin and feeble. In British informal use it is a jeer rather than a description, the kind of word used to tease an unathletic boy. Its edge is mocking, so in polite or careful writing a neutral word such as slight or frail is the safer choice.
- 7To pick out and quietly steal the best items from a collection.
Staff would weed the new shipments, keeping the rarest items for themselves.
She weeded the estate sale, slipping the best jewelry into her bag.
Similarrifle
Note
Here the gardening image runs backwards. Instead of pulling out what is unwanted, the weeder quietly takes what is best. As with the garden verb, the object is the container: a case or a collection is weeded, often in the passive, and ideally with no one the wiser. The context of secrecy is what separates it from the librarian's culling.
- 8To systematically remove books or other materials from a library collection according to set criteria.
Staff weed the reference collection annually, removing outdated editions.
The branch weeded its periodicals to free up shelf space.
Note
Librarians use the word as a term of art, without embarrassment: weeding is routine collection care, and one professional article is even titled "Weed to achieve." Items go for reasons such as poor condition, outdated content or low circulation. Unlike the garden verb, the object can be either the collection (weed the periodicals) or the items removed (weed romance novels that haven't circulated in a year).
- 9A weak or poorly formed horse, regarded as unfit to breed from.
The breeder refused to keep a weed anywhere near his prize mares.
Several weeds were quietly culled from the herd before the auction.
- 10Ellipsis of duckweed.
A thin film of weed spread across the still water of the millpond.
By midsummer the pond was completely choked with weed.
Note
A shortening that drops the duck- and lets the generic word stand for one particular plant: the tiny floating members of the subfamily Lemnoideae, in the arum family Araceae. Like duckweed itself, it is usually handled as a mass rather than counted. A still pond is choked with weed, and a thin film of weed spreads across the water.
- 11Mourning clothing worn by a woman, especially the black garments of a widow, known as widow's weeds.
Note
A survivor of Old English wǣd, "garment", which shares nothing with the garden weed but its spelling. Milton in 1641 pictures England "in a mourning weed", and Keats in 1820 still writes "widow's weed" in the singular. Today the plural widow's weeds is the natural form, and it carries a deliberately archaic tone. It is a narrowing of the word for clothing in general.
- 12A cigar, a tightly rolled bundle of cured tobacco leaves made for smoking.
Note
Where the tobacco sense is a mass noun, this one counts: a single cigar was a weed, lit after dinner and smoked down. It is obsolete, so readers meet it only in older writing, and it is not a word to reach for when offering someone a cigar today.
- 13An item of clothing or a badge worn as an outward sign of grief, such as a mourning garment.
She appeared at the service in a single black weed, marking her recent loss.
The mourners gathered at the graveside, each in the customary weeds of bereavement.
Note
Here clothing narrows to the dress of grief, and that narrowing is the part of the word that lasted. A weed of this kind can be a whole garment or only a token, such as a band worn on the hat. It is the mourning thread that runs through the hatband and into the surviving phrase widow's weeds.
- 14Clothing regarded as a whole; clothes or dress taken collectively.
He dressed in humble weed befitting a wandering monk.
His mother o'er her barm-cloth wide / Gazed forward somewhat timidly / The new-comer's bright weed to see.
1870, William Morris, “September: The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon”Note
A mass use, singular and with no article, standing for clothing in general, as dress or attire does. William Morris has a mother gazing at "the new-comer's bright weed" in 1870, meaning his bright clothes, not one garment. That separates it from a single garment. It is archaic, and suits verse or deliberately old-fashioned prose.
- 15A garment or single article of clothing.
He cast off his outer weed and waded into the cold river.
In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.
1850, [Alfred, Lord Tennyson], In MemoriamNote
For Marlowe and Shakespeare this was everyday dress. When Don Pedro says "put on other weeds" in Much Ado About Nothing, he simply means "let's change clothes." By the time Walter Scott dresses a guide in "the usual weeds of a pilgrim" in Ivanhoe (1819), the word has become a deliberate old-fashioned touch. It is archaic today, and the plural is its most natural form.
- 16A band of material worn around the crown of a hat, often as a sign of mourning.
A wide silk weed encircled his tall black hat.
The undertaker supplied weeds for every mourner's hat at the door.
Note
The hatband keeps the solemn air of the mourning badge. In Duane Hamilton Hurd's History of Essex County, Massachusetts (1888), a beaten commander retreats "with his weed on his hat dragging on the ground," and the trailing band becomes an image of defeat. The usage is archaic. In a modern sentence, a plain hatband or mourning band will be understood.
- 17Underbrush; the low-growing shrubs and undergrowth that cover open ground.
one rushing forth out of the thickest weed
1596, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie QueeneNote
A collective, uncountable use, in which the weed is the whole tangle of undergrowth, the place where something hides or crouches. Spenser has a figure rushing out of the thickest weed in The Faerie Queene (1596), and Tennyson still uses it in 1842 for a leopard crouched in the weed. Today it belongs to poetry and period pastiche, not to plain description of a hillside.
- 18A sudden illness or relapse, often with fever, affecting those about to give birth, giving birth, or who have recently given birth or lost a pregnancy.
Many young mothers succumbed to the weed within days of their delivery.
The physician noted that the weed had taken hold soon after her labor.
Note
A Scots medical word, unrelated to the garden plant. It comes from Scots weid, and a longer Old Scots form, wedonynpha, goes back to the 1500s. Jamieson read it as the "onfall" of a weed, meaning a sudden attack. William Campbell's 1822 Observations on the Disease usually termed Puerperal Fever describes a patient seized with a violent rigor after a miscarriage.
- 19Lymphangitis affecting a horse; inflammation of the lymph vessels, usually in a leg, causing swelling, heat, and lameness.
After standing idle for days, the gelding developed weed in one hind leg.
Rest and cold water helped reduce the weed in the mare's swollen limb.
Note
This is the same Scots word as the childbirth fever, used for horses. It usually works as a mass noun: a horse has weed, or develops weed in a leg. Do not confuse it with the weak horse. A horse with weed is ill, while a horse that is a weed is badly made.
- 20Simple past and past participle of wee. Informal, chiefly British.
The child weed behind a tree partway through the long walk home.
He realized with embarrassment that he had weed in his sleep.
Note
Wee forms its past regularly by adding -d, and the result collides with the gardening verb. One spelling serves as both simple past (the child weed behind a tree) and participle after have (he had weed in his sleep). The lemma is a colloquial British word for urinating, so the form belongs to casual speech, and context has to keep it apart from weeding a lawn.
Showing meanings only.
weed is a form of wee
wee, verb: To urinate; a mild, polite term common in casual British speech. Full entry
- Spelling
- wee → weed: add -d
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /d/.
Practice
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Origins
From Middle English weed, from Old English wēod ("weed"), from Proto-West Germanic *weud. It is related to Dutch wied ("unwanted plant, weed") and Old High German wiota ("fern").
From Middle English weeden, from Old English wēodian ("to weed"), from Proto-Germanic *weudōną ("to uproot, weed"). It is related to Dutch wieden ("to weed") and West Frisian wjûde.
From Middle English wede, from Old English wǣd ("dress, attire, garment"), from Proto-Germanic *wēdiz. It is related to German Wat.
From Scots weid, weed. The longer form weidinonfa is attested since the 1500s; Jamieson analyses it as a compound meaning "onfa(ll) of a weed", while the Scottish National Dictionary treats the short form as a derivative and traces its first element to Old English wēdan ("to be mad or delirious"), from wōd ("mad, enraged").
From the verb wee.