Drawe

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. An archaic past participle meaning that something has been pulled along, extended, or sketched out
2. Old-fashioned form of the past participle, indicating an object that was hauled, tugged, or traced
3. A literary past form signifying that something was dragged, stretched, or depicted in lines

Etymology: "Drawe" is simply an obsolete spelling of "draw," so its history is the history of "draw" itself. In Middle English the verb meant "to drag, pull," and its older ancestor was Old English "dragan," which carried the same sense of hauling or pulling something along. Its sense of "dragged along behind" is therefore the word's oldest meaning, not a later development. The deeper roots are uncertain. The verb may come from a Proto-Germanic form, "draganą," meaning "to carry, draw, pull," and it has relatives across the Germanic languages: German "tragen" ("to bear, carry"), Dutch "dragen," and Swedish "dra" ("to pull"). Some scholars link it to an older Indo-European root, while others suspect a pre-Indo-European origin shared with Latin "trahō," which also means "to pull, draw." The verb "drag" is a close relative of this word, and both descend from the same ancestor. "Draught" is another doublet, which kept a related form through a separate path into English.