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:
Ideally, she said, the federal government would purchase certain water-intensive farmland or pay farmers to leave it fallow, as it did after the Dust Bowl.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 6, 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
The festival is taking a fallow year this summer, allowing the land at Worthy Farm to recover and the film is opening during what would have been the festival weekend.
From BBC ● Jun. 28, 2026
Each year, one field was allowed to lie fallow, and the other two would be planted with a crop different from the one planted there the year before.
From "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village" by Laura Amy Schlitz
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
Spite o' my close, in-door employment, I had grown stalwart and strong; and I mind, on ae occasion, beating twa young fallows who had twitted me on being but a ninth.
From Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 12 by Various
Turnips are now substituted in the place of these naked fallows; and now land in turnips is considered as fallow.
From The Works of Daniel Webster, Volume 1 by Daniel Webster
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
Because the trees require watering in wet years or dry, their acreage can’t be fallowed during dry spells.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 16, 2024
So, she created a machine-learning model to conduct a weighted comparison between active and fallowed land, accounting for factors like location, topography and soil quality.
From Science Daily ● Mar. 25, 2024
Wells ran dry, farmers fallowed fields and cities restricted watering grass.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 6, 2023
Often, owing to want of sufficient hands and shortness of time or other reasons, land which has been fallowed is sown without being first ploughed up.
From Notes on Agriculture in Cyprus and Its Products by William Bevan
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
The results, published in Nature Communications, suggest that variation in efficiency due to farming practices could save as much water as switching crops or fallowing fields.
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
Though fertile and rich enough to produce thirty successive crops of wheat without fallowing, it is not sufficiently rich for the growth of the poppy until largely supplied with manure.
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.
