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
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Down on the Farm
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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:
Farmers will have to fallow their alfalfa fields, homeowners pull out their lawns, industries will have to reform.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 22, 2026
After all, they effectively gave the Brewers a large loan during a fallow stretch of six consecutive seasons without a playoff berth.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 21, 2026
Farmers can be paid to leave fields fallow because keeping water in the river is more valuable than using it to grow a crop.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 16, 2026
The event will take place from 23-27 June 2027 at Worthy Farm in Pilton, Somerset, after a fallow year in 2026.
From BBC ● Sep. 30, 2026
This would turn out to be true, but in the fallow days of late 1956 and early 1957, Livermore’s future looked bleak.
From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik
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
Down they went all day through France with rain speckling the windows of their compartment, past the naked poplar trees and rolling fallows until dusk fell sadly on the flooded agriculture.
From Sinister Street, vol. 2 by Compton MacKenzie
Where we had looked to see the endless interlacings of greenery, and swelling clusters dropping fatness on a carpet of turf, we find only reddish fallows, and rows of dead gooseberry bushes.
From When Love Calls by Stanley John Weyman
The Department of Water Resources said the program has also helped in redirecting floodwaters onto fallowed farmland to recharge groundwater.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 24, 2025
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
That creates systematic differences between fallowed and cultivated fields, which could skew Boser's analysis.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 25, 2024
Although some birds require contiguous grasslands, most adapted to living alongside agriculture when habitat was nestled within or around fields and farmers fallowed some fields, Cornell’s Rodewald says.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 25, 2023
I forgot to say that the land had been fallowed in with three horses in the month of August, and the wheat sowed in October.
From Guano A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers by Solon Robinson
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
That means, among other things, fallowing between 500,000 and 900,000 acres of San Joaquin Valley cropland during the next two decades, experts say.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 13, 2023
Huey Dunn's plan of mellowing, or rotting the soil, was not yet the true fallowing method.
From Land of the Burnt Thigh by Stephen J. Voorhies
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
