fallow
1 Americanadjective
-
(of land) plowed and left unseeded for a season or more; uncultivated.
-
not in use; inactive.
My creative energies have lain fallow this year.
noun
verb (used with object)
-
fallows,
present (3rd person singular)
-
fallowed,
past participle, past
-
fallowing
present participle
adjective
adjective
-
(of land) left unseeded after being ploughed and harrowed to regain fertility for a crop
-
(of an idea, state of mind, etc) undeveloped or inactive, but potentially useful
noun
verb
adjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
fallowsimple
-
fallowssimple
-
have fallowedperfect
-
has fallowedperfect
-
am fallowingprogressive
-
are fallowingprogressive
-
is fallowingprogressive
-
have been fallowingperfect progressive
-
has been fallowingperfect progressive
Past
-
fallowedsimple
-
had fallowedperfect
-
was fallowingprogressive
-
were fallowingprogressive
-
had been fallowingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of fallow1
1275–1325; Middle English falwe; compare Old English fealga, plural of *fealh, as gloss of Medieval Latin occas harrows
Origin of fallow2
before 1000; Middle English fal ( o ) we, Old English fealu; cognate with German falb
Explanation
Something that is fallow is left unused. If you’re smart but lazy, someone might say you have a fallow mind. We use the word to talk about any unused resource, it started as a work about land. Fallow comes from the old English word for plowing, and refers to the practice of leaving fields unplowed in rotation — when a field lies fallow, the soil regains nutrients that are sucked up by over-planting.
Vocabulary lists containing fallow
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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Down on the Farm
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "F"
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
After the communist government fell in 1991, his family was handed ownership of its chunk of peninsula farmland, which had since gone fallow.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 9, 2026
The Landover data center site was proposed by Lerner Enterprises, a D.C.-based real estate firm that’s operated by the family that owns the Washington Nationals and has rights to that fallow lot.
From Slate ● Aug. 6, 2026
As a result, fallow fields are in a "deplorable state, and at the slightest spark, the blaze spreads like wildfire" due to vegetation dried out by the heat.
From Barron's ● Jul. 25, 2026
Following the tournament's fallow week, Ireland will look to get back on track and pick up their second home victory in the campaign.
From BBC ● May 7, 2026
The huts stood in fallow fields, studded with African weeds and shoots of young saplings.
From "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston
Swidden-fallow systems, he argues, maintain a mosaic of fields, fallows, and forests, that is heterogeneous and therefore resilient to climate change.
From National Geographic ● Mar. 8, 2016
Today Mr. Skov fallows a fifth of his fields, and canal water that once flowed from March to October arrives in June and vanishes as early as August.
From New York Times ● Apr. 12, 2015
Around 25% are using improved fallows with nitrogen-fixing trees, a scientific farming approach developed and introduced into Sauri by the World Agroforestry Center.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the south spread the green fields and red fallows of Clearwater, bathed in the sheen of the lingering sun.
From John March, Southerner by George W. Cable
The weedy fallows winter-worn, Where cattle shiver under sodden hay.
From Song-Surf by Cale Young Rice
Estimates suggest up to 900,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley alone might need to be fallowed to reduce the drawdown of groundwater and balance supply and demand.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2024
Crops that could be fallowed during dry spells, leaving more water for the environment, were supplanted by almond and pistachio orchards, which require water in wet years and dry.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 18, 2024
“Ultimately what you end up with is potential for, honestly, a lot of fallowed land, and that same crop being imported into this country from other countries,” Covington said.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 17, 2024
Researchers applied crushed rock, both metabasalt and olivine, on 5 acres of a fallowed cornfield in the Sacramento Valley.
From Science Daily ● Oct. 24, 2023
At first it should be summer fallowed or cultivated every few weeks throughout the summer, to kill the weeds and make it fine and level.
From Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study by Ontario. Ministry of Education
Options include “more efficient irrigation, less water-intensive crops and short-term fallowing of fields,” according to Michael Cohen, a senior fellow at the Pacific Institute.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 16, 2026
"We're probably going to have to fall back on fallowing at least a little bit," Boser said, "but hopefully not as much as we were originally expecting."
From Science Daily ● Mar. 25, 2024
These groups became convinced that this relic technology could curb hunger in the Andes by enabling back-to-back potato harvests with no need for fallowing.
From Salon ● Feb. 26, 2024
The federal money supporting the fallowing of farmland functions “like a painkiller,” said Newsha Ajami, chief development officer for research at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 24, 2023
The catch crops add organic matter while cleansing the land of weeds; the fallowing releases plant-food and is peculiarly efficient in killing out weeds.
From Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement by Alva Agee
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
