means A farming tool, traditionally pulled by animals or machines, that cuts and turns over soil to prepare it for planting — and, as a verb, to drive forcefully through something.

from From Old English 'plōh' or 'plōg', a word rooted across the Germanic languages — a cousin of Old Norse 'plógr', Dutch 'ploeg', and German 'Pflug'. Curiously, the word originally referred not to the tool itself but to a measure of land: the amount a team of oxen could plow in a day. Beyond Germanic, the deeper origin is murky, possibly borrowed from an early non-Indo-European source, since the older Germanic word for the tool was something else entirely. The American spelling 'plow' won out over British 'plough' largely through the simplifying instincts of dictionary-makers.