Foraged

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To have hunted for and gathered sustenance or useful materials from natural surroundings in an intentional manner
2. To have actively searched for and collected food and other valuable items from wilderness areas during a previous time period
3. To have sought out and gathered essential resources or edible items from the wild in a purposeful way

Etymology: The past form "foraged" comes from the verb "forage," which first entered English in Middle English from Old French "fourage," meaning fodder for animals. The French word was itself built on "fuerre," meaning fodder or straw, which came from a Frankish word "fōdar" and ultimately from a Proto-Germanic root meaning both feed and sheath. That double sense hints at the word's oldest shape: fodder was what livestock ate, and the same root gave Old English "fōdor," a word that could mean food, covering, case, or basket. The English verb's sense of gathering wild food grew out of that military and farming background. Foraging was originally about securing feed for horses and cattle, and the notion of searching the countryside for supplies later widened to people hunting for edible plants and game. The modern human sense of gathering wild food is thus a broadening of an animal-feeding task rather than a separate coinage.

Synonyms: searched, scavenged, gathered