/baʊ/ or /boʊ/
[noun] A bending of the head or body as a sign of respect or greeting; also a curved weapon used to shoot arrows, or the front of a ship. The word has several different meanings depending on how it is pronounced.
'Bow' is actually three completely different words that look identical — a linguistic accident that has confused English speakers for centuries.
Few English words carry as much hidden complexity as 'bow.' What appears to be a single word is actually two — or arguably three — entirely separate words that happen to have collapsed into the same spelling over centuries of language change. The story of how this happened is a quiet masterpiece of linguistic coincidence, touching Old English, Old Norse, and the slow erosion of sounds that once kept these words apart.
The first 'bow,' pronounced /boʊ/ to rhyme with 'low,' traces its roots to the Old English word 'boga,' meaning a curved or arched object — most specifically the weapon used to launch arrows. 'Boga' came from the Proto-Germanic root *bugô, which derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *bheug-, meaning 'to bend.' This same ancient root gave rise to the Old High German 'bogo' and Old Norse 'bogi,' all referring to the same curved weapon. When Norman French flooded into English after 1066, the bow-and-arrow remained a firmly English and Germanic concept — the weapon of the common soldier and the forest outlaw. By the 13th century, 'boga' had softened into 'bowe' and then simply 'bow,' retaining its long vowel sound throughout.
The second 'bow,' pronounced /baʊ/ to rhyme with 'now,' meaning a bending of the body in respect or greeting, comes from Old English 'būgan,' a verb meaning 'to bend, bow, or yield.' This too descended from the same Proto-Germanic *beugan and the same Proto-Indo-European root *bheug-. So both 'bows' are, deep down, cousins — both ultimately about bending. Yet in Old English they were kept clearly apart by their different forms and sounds. Over the centuries, English pronunciation shifted dramatically during what linguists call the Great Vowel Shift (roughly 1400–1700), and the two words drifted into entirely separate phonetic territories. The curved weapon kept its /oʊ/ sound; the act of inclining the head settled into /baʊ/.
The third meaning — the front section of a ship — arrived from an entirely different direction. This 'bow' (pronounced /baʊ/) is borrowed from Low German 'Boog' or Dutch 'boeg,' meaning the shoulder of a ship or the rounded front section of a vessel. Sailors and merchants trading along the North Sea coasts brought this nautical term into English around the 15th and 16th centuries. Interestingly, the Dutch 'boeg' is related to the same Proto-Germanic root as the others — the idea of a rounded, curving shape — making all three words distant relatives despite their separate journeys into the language.
There is also a fourth sense: the decorative 'bow' tied in ribbons or shoelaces, again pronounced /boʊ/. This meaning developed naturally from the archer's bow, since both share the essential quality of a curved or looped shape. By the 16th century, English speakers were using 'bow' to describe any knot or loop made with ribbon or string, extending the image of the weapon's gracefully curved arc into the domestic world of fashion and gift-wrapping.
What makes 'bow' so remarkable is not just that it contains multiple meanings, but that those meanings carry the ghost of a single ancient idea — bending — expressed in weapons, gestures of respect, the curved prow of a ship, and a tied ribbon. A person who bows, a ship's bow, and a bow and arrow all curve toward the world in their own way. The word is a reminder that English is not a tidy system but a living accumulation of coincidences, migrations, and the slow reshaping of sound over time.