Tilling

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. The act of cultivating and preparing soil involves breaking it up to support the growth of crops while enhancing its nutrients for agriculture
2. This agricultural technique entails turning and aerating the earth to create optimal conditions for planting seeds and improving soil health
3. The process of preparing land for agricultural purposes includes loosening and turning the soil to foster crop production and enhance its nutrient content

Etymology: "Tilling" is the -ing form of "till," a verb meaning to cultivate land by turning over the soil. Its ancestry runs back to Old English, where "tilian" meant to strive for, to aim at, or to attain something, and only later came to mean working the earth. The sense of cultivating ground appeared as the old word narrowed toward agriculture, so the farming meaning is a specialization of a broader idea of effort and pursuit. The "-ing" ending is the ordinary Old English suffix that turns a verb into a noun for the action itself. In Middle English the form appeared in several spellings, including "tillynge" and "tiliyng," and two separate Old English bases, "tiliende" and "tilung," fed into it. That is why the word's earliest recorded forms vary so much.

Synonyms: plowing, cultivating, farming