Turning over soil with a plow to prepare it for planting; or pushing through something with effort.
From Old Norse 'plogr' and Middle English 'plough.' The tool and technique came from Scandinavian peoples and became fundamental to European agriculture.
The plow is one of humanity's most revolutionary technologies—it literally transformed wild grasslands into farmland and made civilization possible, which is why so many languages borrowed the Norse word for it!
Agricultural labor was historically divided by gender; ploughing was coded masculine in many Western contexts, excluding women from land ownership and economic participation tied to farming.
Use freely; context matters—when discussing labor history, acknowledge women's actual agricultural contributions beyond plow work (seed, harvest, processing).
Women performed 40-50% of agricultural labor globally and historically; romanticized masculinity of 'ploughman' erased their essential food production work.
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