tiller

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈtɪlə/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪlə(ɹ)

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

tiller (plural tillers)

1. A person who tills; a farmer.
   • 2000, Alasdair Gray, The Book of Prefaces, Bloomsbury, published 2002, page 63:

     In France, Europe's most fertile and cultivated land, the tillers of it suffered more and more hunger.

2. A machine that mechanically tills the soil.

• (machine): cultivator

• motor plow

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”).

• tillow

tiller (plural tillers)

1. (obsolete) A young tree.
   • 1664, J[ohn] E[velyn], Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions. , London: Jo Martyn, and Ja Allestry, printers to the Royal Society, , →OCLC:

     first you must provide you of a Ladder to ascend the top of your Pit : this they usually make of a curved Tiller fit to apply to the convex shape of the heap

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

tiller (third-person singular simple present tillers, present participle tillering, simple past and past participle tillered)

1. (intransitive) To produce new shoots from the root or from around the bottom of the original stalk; stool.

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

tiller (plural tillers)

1. (archery) The stock; a beam on a crossbow carved to fit the arrow, or the point of balance in a longbow.
   • c. 1608–1610, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, “Philaster: Or, Love Lies a Bleeding”, in Comedies and Tragedies , London: Humphrey Robinson, , and for Humphrey Moseley , published 1679, →OCLC, Act II, scene ii:

     You can shoot in a tiller.

2. (nautical) 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. (nautical) 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. (aviation, by extension) 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.
5. A handle; a stalk.
6. The rear-wheel steering control, aboard a tiller truck.
7. (UK, dialect, obsolete) A small drawer; a till.
   • 1693, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, John Dryden, transl., “ The Sixth Satyr”, in The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis. Translated into English Verse. Together with the Satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus. , London: Printed for Jacob Tonson , →OCLC:

     But search her cabinet, and thou shalt find
     Each tiller there with love-epistles lin'd

• steady hand on the tiller
• tiller extension
• tiller truck
• tillerman

• “tiller”, in The Century Dictionary , New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• “tiller”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• retill, rillet

tiller

1. nominative plural of til