Lawnmowers

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A machine with rotating blades designed to cut grass to an even height in gardens or lawns
2. Equipment used for maintaining outdoor green spaces by trimming grass efficiently
3. A mechanical device utilized for regular mowing of grassy areas, ensuring neat and tidy landscapes

Etymology: The plural of "lawnmower" follows the ordinary rule for English nouns ending in a consonant-plus-"-er" sound: add "-s". The word itself is a plain compound, "lawn" plus "mower," and both halves have long pedigrees in English. "Mower" comes from the Old English "mawan" (to cut down with a scythe) and the agent suffix "-ere," meaning someone or something that does the action, so a mower was originally a person wielding a scythe. "Lawn" took a winding route. Its ancestors reach back to a Celtic word for an open space, which passed into Latin as "landa" and then into Old French as "lande," meaning heath or unfarmed land. Middle English borrowed it as "laund," and over the following centuries the word shifted from wild open ground toward the cultivated, mown turf we now picture, until "lawn" settled into its modern sense. The machine itself is a much later coinage. Once the rotary blade made it possible to cut grass without a scythe, "lawn mower" was formed by simply joining the two existing words, and the compound is what this plural describes.

Synonyms: mowers, grass cutters