Forms and etym.: see WIND sb.1 and ROW sb.1 (also 8–9 winrow). A row in which mown grass or hay is laid before being made up into heaps or cocks, in which sods, peats or sheaves of corn are set up to be dried by exposure to the wind, or in which dead branches, etc., are gathered to be burnt.
Also collect. or abstr. in phr. into or out of windrow.
1523–34. Fitzherb., Husb., § 25. On the nexte daye, tourne it agayne before none, and towarde nyght make it in wyndrowes, and than in smal hey-cockes.
1641. Best, Farm. Bks. (Surtees), 54. Others,… when barley is loggery, and full of greenes, will sette it windrowe stooke.
1691. Ray, S. & E. C. Words, A Wind-row, the Greens or Borders of a Field dug up, in order to the carrying the Earth on to the Land to mend it. It is called Windrow because it is laid in rows, and exposed to the Wind.
1726. [see UPGANGER].
1764. Museum Rust., III. lxv. 297. A machine for raking hay-grass into wind-row, drawn by a horse.
1802. Sibbald, Chron. Scot. Poetry, IV. Gloss., Winraw, hay or peats put together in long thin heaps for the purpose of being more easily dried.
1830. Hodgson, in Raine, Mem. (1858), II. 176. They are also leading much of their hay out of windrow.
1844. H. Stephens, Bk. Farm, III. 967. After the second 2 ridges have been thus cleared, the third ridge being in the middle, contains the grass of 5 ridges, which is called a windrow.
1882. Howells, Modern Instance, xxxix. The farmers were … heaping into vast windrows for burning the winter-worn stalks of the last year’s crop.
b. transf. of similar rows of various things, e.g., of trees blown down (cf. WINDFALL 1) or of dust heaped up by the wind.
1868. Rep. U.S. Comm. Agric. (1869), 176. Logs of all sizes lie in winrows.
1881. C. H. Farnham, in Scribner’s Mag., Aug., 529/2. The river [Hudson] is divided into long lanes and fields of smooth ice by windrows crossing in every direction.
1901. ‘Lucas Malet,’ Sir Richard Calmady, I. x. The blue of the upper sky was crossed by curved winrows of flaky, opalescent cloud.
