Sow — From Old English to English | etymologist.ai
sow
/soʊ/·verb·c. 725 CE, in Old English agricultural charters and glossaries; the strong verb form sēow appears in early texts, with metaphorical use in homilies from the 9th century onward.·Established
Origin
Sow descends from Proto-Germanic *sēaną and ultimately PIE *seh₁-, one of the oldest agricultural verbs in the Indo-European family, cognate with Latin serere and Greek speirein, surviving the Norman Conquest and persisting in English unchanged in its essential form for over a thousand years.
Definition
To scatter or plant seed in or on the ground for growth, from Old English sāwan, from Proto-Germanic *sēaną, from PIE *seh₁- (to sow, scatter seed).
The Full Story
Old Englishc. 700–1100 CEwell-attested
From Old English sāwan (to sow, scatter seed), from Proto-Germanic *sēaną, from PIE *seh₁- (to sow, scatter seed). This is one of the oldest agricultural terms in any Indo-European language, shared across virtually the entire IE family: Latin serere (whence English 'series', 'serial'), Greek speirein (whence 'spore', 'diaspora' — with s-mobile prefix), Old Church Slavonic sejati, and Russian sejat'. The breadth of these cognates across every major IE branch confirms that the word was already in use before the breakup of Proto-Indo-European, placing it among the earliest agricultural vocabulary
Did you know?
The verb *sow* is one of a small group of words that can be traced back to the very beginnings of Indo-European agriculture. Its root, PIE *seh₁-, appears in Latin (serere), Greek (speirein), and Slavic (sejati), meaning the word was already ancient when the Romans were building their first roads, when the Greeks were composing their first epics. Linguists estimate the PIE period at roughly 4000–3500 BCE — meaning this syllable, in some form, has been spoken by farming
land use, and enters homiletic literature through the Parable of the Sower, where sāwan carries the metaphorical weight of scattering God's word across the soils of the human soul. Ælfric and other preachers exploited this agricultural metaphor extensively. The word survived the Norman Conquest unchallenged — French semer (from Latin seminare) never displaced it — because it was too central to the peasant farming vocabulary to be dislodged. The strong past participle 'sown' persists alongside weak 'sowed', a relic of the original ablaut. Note: the homograph 'sow' (female pig) is etymologically unrelated, from OE sugu, PGmc *sugō, PIE *suh₁-. Key roots: *seh₁- (Proto-Indo-European: "to sow, scatter seed"), *sēaną (Proto-Germanic: "to sow"), sāwan (Old English: "to sow, scatter seed").