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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

tiller.

A person who tills; a farmer.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈtɪlə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈtɪlɚ/General-American
  1. A person who tills; a farmer.

  2. A machine that mechanically tills the soil.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English tilier; equivalent to till + -er.

noun/ˈtɪlə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈtɪlɚ/General-American
  1. A young tree.

    obsolete
  2. A shoot of a plant which springs from the root or bottom of the original stalk; a sapling; a sucker.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English telȝre, telgra, from Old English telgor, telgra, telgre ("twig, branch, shoot") (also telga, telge (whence tillow)), from Proto-West Germanic *telguʀ, from Proto-Germanic *telguz (“twig, branch”), from Proto-Indo-European *delgʰ- (“to split, divide, cut, carve”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Tälge (“sapling”), Dutch telg (“descendant, scion, offshoot, shoot”), Dutch Low Saxon telge (“twig, branch”), German Zelge (“twig, branch, bough”), Swedish telning (“branch, scion, sapling”), Icelandic tág (“willow-twig”).

verb/ˈtɪlə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈtɪlɚ/General-American
  1. To produce new shoots from the root or from around the bottom of the original stalk; stool.

    intransitive
Where this word comes from

From Middle English telȝre, telgra, from Old English telgor, telgra, telgre ("twig, branch, shoot") (also telga, telge (whence tillow)), from Proto-West Germanic *telguʀ, from Proto-Germanic *telguz (“twig, branch”), from Proto-Indo-European *delgʰ- (“to split, divide, cut, carve”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Tälge (“sapling”), Dutch telg (“descendant, scion, offshoot, shoot”), Dutch Low Saxon telge (“twig, branch”), German Zelge (“twig, branch, bough”), Swedish telning (“branch, scion, sapling”), Icelandic tág (“willow-twig”).

noun/ˈtɪlə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈtɪlɚ/General-American
  1. The stock; a beam on a crossbow carved to fit the arrow, or the point of balance in a longbow.

  2. A bar of iron or wood connected with the rudderhead and leadline, usually forward, in which the rudder is moved as desired by the tiller (FM 55-501).

  3. The handle of the rudder which the helmsman holds to steer the boat, a piece of wood or metal extending forward from the rudder over or through the transom. Generally attached at the top of the rudder.

  4. A steering wheel, usually mounted on the lower portion of the captain's control column, which is used to steer the aircraft's nosewheel or tailwheel to provide steering during taxi.

    broadly
  5. A handle; a stalk.

  6. The rear-wheel steering control, aboard a tiller truck.

  7. A small drawer; a till.

    UK · dialectal · obsolete
Where this word comes from

From Middle English teler, from Anglo-Norman telier (“beam used in weaving”), from Medieval Latin telarium, from Latin tēla (“web”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.