Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive verb To prepare (land) for the raising of crops, as by plowing and harrowing; cultivate.
  • noun A drawer, small chest, or compartment for money, as in a store.
  • noun A supply of money; a purse.
  • noun Glacial drift composed of an unconsolidated, heterogeneous mixture of clay, sand, pebbles, cobbles, and boulders.
  • preposition Until.
  • conjunction Until.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To exert one's self for; labor for; procure by exertion; earn; gain; obtain; get.
  • To attain; reach; extend.
  • To labor on; work; cultivate: as, to till the soil.
  • To set; prepare.
  • To prop up.
  • To draw; pull; hence, to entice; allure.
  • To draw; stretch; reach.
  • To; unto: expressing motion to a place or person.
  • Up to; down to; as far as: expressing distance, extent, or degree.
  • To; unto: expressing action directed to or having regard to a person.
  • To; unto: expressing change or result.
  • To the time of; until: as, I waited till five o'clock.
  • To the time that; to the time when; until.
  • noun In geology, a stiff clay containing boulders of all sizes up to several tons in weight, and these often smoothed and striated by glacial action.
  • noun A drawer; a tray, as of a trunk or box. Also called tiller.
  • noun Specifically A money-drawer; a drawer under or in a shop-counter, in which money is kept.
  • noun In printing: In earlier forms of hand printing-presses, a crosspiece extending between the main uprights of the frame, and serving to guide and steady the hose or sleeve, which contained the spindle and screws. Also called shelf.
  • noun One of the spaces or cells between the ribbed projections of the platen of a hand-press.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Prov. Eng. A vetch; a tare.
  • noun A tray or drawer in a chest.
  • noun A money drawer in a shop or store.
  • noun a device for sounding an alarm when a money drawer is opened or tampered with.
  • noun (Geol.) A deposit of clay, sand, and gravel, without lamination, formed in a glacier valley by means of the waters derived from the melting glaciers; -- sometimes applied to alluvium of an upper river terrace, when not laminated, and appearing as if formed in the same manner.
  • noun A kind of coarse, obdurate land.
  • intransitive verb To cultivate land.
  • transitive verb To plow and prepare for seed, and to sow, dress, raise crops from, etc., to cultivate.
  • transitive verb obsolete To prepare; to get.
  • preposition To; unto; up to; as far as; until; -- now used only in respect to time, but formerly, also, of place, degree, etc., and still so used in Scotland and in parts of England and Ireland
  • preposition to the present time.
  • preposition to that time.
  • conjunction As far as; up to the place or degree that; especially, up to the time that; that is, to the time specified in the sentence or clause following; until.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • preposition now dialectal to
  • preposition until, up to, as late as (a given time)
  • conjunction until, until the time that
  • noun A cash register
  • noun A removable box within a cash register containing the money
  • noun The contents of a cash register, for example at the beginning or end of the day or of a cashier's shift
  • noun glacial drift consisting of a mixture of clay, sand, pebbles and boulders
  • noun dialect manure or other material used to fertilize land
  • verb transitive to develop so as to improve or prepare for usage; to cultivate (said of knowledge, virtue, mind etc)
  • verb transitive to work or cultivate or plough (soil); to prepare for growing vegetation and crops
  • verb intransitive to cultivate soil

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb work land as by ploughing, harrowing, and manuring, in order to make it ready for cultivation
  • noun unstratified soil deposited by a glacier; consists of sand and clay and gravel and boulders mixed together

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English tillen, from Old English tilian.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English tille.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Origin unknown.]

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old English til, from Old Norse.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English (Northumbrian) til, from Old Norse til.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English tillen "to draw" from Old English -tyllan (as in betyllan "to lure, decoy," and fortyllan "draw away;" related to tollian). Or alternatively from Anglo-Norman tylle "compartment" from Old French tille "compartment, shelter on a ship" from Old Norse þilja "plank." Cognate with Albanian ndjell ("I lure, attract").

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Unknown, but possibly via etymology 3 (the verb) because alluvial deposit is used as a fertilizer.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English tilian

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Examples

Comments

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  • Online Dictionary. The size and shape of the sediments that constitute till vary widely.

    October 7, 2010

  • Why is till short for until? You save yourself only one letter, and you have to remember to add in that extra l.

    February 28, 2011

  • Actually, until is long for till. "Till" came first.

    February 28, 2011

  • That makes me feel a little better--I was assuming until was long for unto.

    February 28, 2011

  • That makes sense, rolig. After all, you only have to write one extra letter, and you don't have to worry about that extra l.

    February 28, 2011

  • Hmph.

    *wanders over to 'cause*

    February 28, 2011

  • So, is until what I do to my garden after the harvest?

    March 1, 2011

  • How do you know that till came first? Link, please. :)

    March 3, 2011

  • An alternative way of saying 'to' (Belfast)

    'I'm going to till the shop."

    July 27, 2011

  • An interesting article on the subject of a minute difference between till and until.

    http://contentcaramel.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/till-and-until-are-different/

    February 20, 2013

  • I found out that till is short for 'to while'.

    Here's an analytical study of 'to' 'till' 'until'. http://goo.gl/i0r7x

    It's good reading.

    "An analytical dictionary of the English language - Page clxxix

    books.google.ca/books?id=Wwi5sUW6R18C

    David Booth - 1835 - Read - More editions

    that Till is a word compounded of To and While, i. e. Time. And you will observe that the coalescence of ... So that when we say 'from morn till night ' it is no more than if we said 'from morn to time night.' When we say 'from morn to night,' the ..."

    February 21, 2013

  • That may be, in part, because he is an old-fashioned generalist, more interested in understanding the connective tissue between seemingly disparate ideas than in tilling a small patch of disciplinary soil.

    Till: transitive v. To prepare (land) for the raising of crops, as by plowing and harrowing; cultivate.

    https://www.chronicle.com/article/whats-so-dangerous-about/242256

    January 18, 2018