weeds

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of weed.

   Thick weeds choked the abandoned lot by midsummer.

   Farmers spray to keep weeds from crowding out the crops.

   Note

   A regular plural, built on the countable plant meaning: weeds are the unwanted plants that crowd a bed, a lot or a field. The uses of weed that are uncountable, such as cannabis and tobacco, normally stay singular. You pull weeds, but you smoke weed. The same spelling also covers an unrelated, much older word, the obsolete word for clothes.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of weed.

   The gardener weeds between the rows after every heavy rainfall.

   Each spring she weeds the entire border by hand.

   Note

   The present-tense verb that agrees with he, she or it: the gardener weeds, the library weeds. Every use of the verb takes an object, such as a border, a bed or a collection. Librarians use it for culling stock against set criteria, and figuratively it can mean skimming off the best items. It is spelled exactly like the plural noun, and its position after a subject tells the two apart.

   The library weeds its reference shelves every few years.

   Each autumn he weeds out the worn paperbacks and keeps the first editions.

3. 3
   nounobsoleteplural

   Clothing; the garments or apparel worn on the body.

   Come, let us hence, and put on other weeds;

   1598, William Shakespeare, “Much Adoe about Nothing”

   What sight is this? What company of women Is wending hitherward, in sable weeds Conspicuous?

   1886, Aeschylus, Choephori

   Note

   A separate word that only looks like the garden one. It comes from Old English wǣd, from a Germanic word for a piece of cloth. Always plural, it now reads as period language. Shakespeare's Much Adoe about Nothing has "put on other weeds", and Anna Swanwick's 1886 Aeschylus shows mourners "in sable weeds". Its living trace is widow's weeds, the dark dress of mourning. Elsewhere, say clothes.

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