leasow

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English leesewe, lesewe, leswe, from Old English lǣs (“pasture”), from Proto-West Germanic *lāsu (“pasture”).

Pronunciation
  • IPA(key): /ˈliːzəʊ/

Noun

leasow (plural leasows)

  1. (now rare, dialectal, historical) (Green) land as opposed to flood or desert; a pasture.
    • 1803 July 25, Hester Piozzi, Thraliana:
      Reflexions in her Book, strike one as a Statue does among the tangled Thickets of the Leasowes […] .
    • 1826, Thomas Gill, The Technical repository:
      The oxen which are brought on in succession, run the first summer in the park, and in the leasows and temporary straw-yards in the winter; [...]
    • 2012, Christopher Dyer, A Country Merchant, 1495-1520:
      Lords could create a leasow by fencing off part of their demesne, if it was held in a block rather than being scattered over the fields and intermingled with the land of tenants.
    • 2013, Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After:
      Imprimis we do present upon our oaths that one Gilbert Wheeler gentleman enclosed a leasow called the Hide containing 20 acres which was common about 10 years past with the fields there.

Verb

leasow (third-person singular simple present leasows, present participle leasowing, simple past and past participle leasowed)

  1. (transitive, archaic or dialectal) To feed or pasture

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “leasow”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

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