harvest

American  

[hahr-vist] / ˈhɑr vɪst /

noun

• harvests
  plural

1. 

   the gathering of crops.

   Drought has delayed the harvest of corn, peanuts, potatoes, and other vegetables.

2. the season when ripened crops are gathered.

   All through springtime, summer, and harvest, she waited for him.

3. a crop or yield of one growing season.

   Our blackberries are on track to meet or exceed last year's harvest of 30 lbs.

4. a supply of anything gathered at maturity and stored.

   The silos held an abundant harvest of wheat.

5. the taking or removal of animals to be killed for food or other uses.

   Some have called the harvest of nautilus shells for jewelry and ornaments a “horrendous slaughter.”

6. the collection of any resource for future use.

   Rules were established to limit the harvest of forest resources for fuel and building materials.

7. the extraction of an organ or tissue from a body for the purpose of transplant or scientific research.

   The new method could improve the harvest of stem cells from umbilical cord blood.

8. the result or consequence of any act, process, or event.

   The journey yielded a harvest of wonderful memories.

   Synonyms:

   return, product, collection, accumulation

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verb (used with object)

• harvests,
  present (3rd person singular)
• harvested,
  past participle,  past
• harvesting
  present participle

1. to gather (a crop or the like); reap.

   It’s time to harvest the corn.

2. to gather the crop from.

   The farmer hired a few day laborers to help harvest his fields.

3. to gain, win, or use (a prize, product, or result of any past act, process, etc.).

   The country hopes to harvest dividends from staging a problem-free Olympics next year.

4. to catch, take, or remove (animals), especially for food.

   Fishermen harvested hundreds of salmon from the river.

5. to collect (any resource) for future use.

   to harvest solar energy;

   spammers who harvest email addresses.

6. to extract (an organ or tissue) from a living or dead body, as for transplantation or research.

   to harvest a kidney;

   to harvest embryos.

verb (used without object)

• harvests,
  present (3rd person singular)
• harvested,
  past participle,  past
• harvesting
  present participle

1. to gather a crop; reap.

   We saw whole families out in the fields, harvesting.

harvest British  

/ ˈhɑːvɪst /

noun

1. the gathering of a ripened crop

2. the crop itself or the yield from it in a single growing season

3. the season for gathering crops

4. the product of an effort, action, etc

   a harvest of love

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verb

1. to gather or reap (a ripened crop) from (the place where it has been growing)

2. (tr) to receive or reap (benefits, consequences, etc)

3. (tr) to remove (an organ) from the body for transplantation

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• harvestability
  noun
• harvesting
  noun
• preharvest
  noun
• reharvest
  verb
• half-harvested
  adjective
• harvestable
  adjective
• harvestless
  adjective
• postharvest
  adjective
• unharvested
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• harvests
  plural

Participles

• harvesting
  present
• harvested
  past

Conjugated Forms

Present

• harvest
  simple
• harvests
  simple
• have harvested
  perfect
• has harvested
  perfect
• am harvesting
  progressive
• are harvesting
  progressive
• is harvesting
  progressive
• have been harvesting
  perfect progressive
• has been harvesting
  perfect progressive

Past

• harvested
  simple
• had harvested
  perfect
• was harvesting
  progressive
• were harvesting
  progressive
• had been harvesting
  perfect progressive

Future

• will harvest
  simple
• will have harvested
  perfect
• will be harvesting
  progressive
• will have been harvesting
  perfect progressive

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Etymology

Origin of harvest

First recorded before 950; Middle English; Old English hærfest; cognate with German Herbst “autumn”; akin to Greek karpós “fruit,” Latin carpere “to pluck” ( see carpe diem, carpel)

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Explanation

The harvest is the time when you reap what you sow. As a verb, to harvest something means that you pick or gather it. You might harvest your sweet corn late in the summer. As a noun, harvest means the time of year when crops are ripe and ready to be gathered. The picked crop is also called a harvest: a bumper crop is a plentiful harvest, and a poor harvest is when things didn’t grow as well as expected. As a verb, to harvest something is to gather, trap, or cull it. You can harvest a soybean crop, you can harvest beaver pelts, or you can harvest tissues or organs for transplants.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

harvest harvests harvested harvesting

That fateful Thursday is approaching — the day when millions of American families gather in their homes for a traditional fall harvest meal, sometimes with a side dish of awkwardness and argument.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 11, 2026

Maize prices also fell, weighed down by U.S. harvest pressure and expectations of ample supplies in South America.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2026

In agriculture, the same knowledge could help researchers develop cereal crops that are less likely to fall over before harvest.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 1, 2026

Several other attacks on Palestinians during the annual olive harvest have also been reported in the run-up to the elections.

From BBC ● Oct. 27, 2026

It was the orchard after the harvest, with bushels of apples under all of the trees.

From "Ida B" by Katherine Hannigan

Hundreds of schools were closed, cereal harvests were down 11%, and ambulance services were inundated with calls beyond levels seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

From BBC ● Nov. 12, 2026

A powerful El Niño threatens to disrupt coffee harvests around the world, adding to farmers’ already steep production costs.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 22, 2026

By revealing how a previously underexplored class of plant immune receptors can be engineered to recognize multiple fungal threats, the researchers have identified a possible new strategy for protecting future harvests.

From Science Daily ● Oct. 15, 2026

Some 1,200 sheep are brought in to graze on the crops in between rice harvests, and they leave behind organic matter, which enriches the soil naturally.

From Barron's ● Oct. 12, 2026

Those wild cereal harvests were precursors to the domestication of the earliest crops, the cereals wheat and barley, in the Fertile Crescent.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

Newly planted vines need about three years before they can be harvested, and the winery tends to sign medium-term deals, three to five years, with the vineyards where it buys grapes.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 7, 2026

Farmworkers – who harvested cotton, vegetables and fruits — organized and marched for roughly 400 miles from the Valley to Austin to demand fair wages and better working conditions.

From Salon ● Oct. 31, 2026

New Mexico sued the company in 2021 after revelations surfaced that a U.K. political consulting firm had harvested millions of Facebook users’ personal data without their consent.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 21, 2026

Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm found to have improperly harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users for targeted political advertising, notably during the 2016 US presidential election.

From Barron's ● Oct. 21, 2026

Most were too young to be harvested, too weak to sell to Nine for salve.

From "The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest" by Aubrey Hartman

But the AI plagiarists harvesting her jokes have left Jasunas, a Los Angeles-based artist, pleading with Silicon Valley tech giants to intervene.

From Barron's ● Nov. 11, 2026

The Woodland Trust said unsustainable harvesting of plants - and particularly fungi - could put wildlife under pressure.

From BBC ● Nov. 3, 2026

Existing scorpion antivenoms are produced by injecting horses with venom and harvesting their plasma antibodies, making them expensive to produce, variable and effective only against specific species.

From MarketWatch ● Oct. 20, 2026

And, of course, there’s a brain-melting plan for SpaceX to launch data centers into orbit, harvesting free power from the sun.

From Slate ● Oct. 19, 2026

I worked, too, harvesting maize and fava beans.

From "The Book of Unknown Americans" by Cristina Henríquez

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Related Words

• accumulate
• amass
• collect
• gather
• hoard
• mow
• pick
• pluck
• reap
• take in

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