meadow: [OE] Etymologically, meadow means ‘mowed land’. It goes back ultimately to an Indo-European *mētwá, a derivative of the base *mē- ‘mow’ (source of English mow [OE]). In prehistoric Germanic this became *mǣdwō (whence German matte ‘meadow’), which passed into Old English as mǣd. The modern English descendant of this, mead, now survives only as an archaism, but its inflected form, mǣdwe, has become modern English meadow. => mow
