/tɪl/
[verb] To prepare land for growing crops by digging or turning the soil. A farmer tills the earth to make it ready for planting seeds.
The word 'till' for farming land is actually older than 'till' meaning 'until' — the opposite of what most people assume.
The farming sense of 'till' is one of the oldest words in the English language, rooted deep in the soil of Germanic prehistory. It comes from Old English 'tilian', which meant to strive, to work towards, or to cultivate. This Old English verb was related to 'til', meaning a fixed point or goal — the idea being that a farmer works the earth with a purpose in mind. Its cousins appear across the Germanic family of languages: Old Frisian had 'tilia', Old Saxon had 'tilian', and Old High German had 'zilon', all sharing the sense of purposeful effort directed toward a goal.
What is surprising to most people is that this agricultural 'till' is entirely unrelated to the preposition 'till' meaning 'until', which looks and sounds identical. The prepositional 'till' comes from Old Norse 'til', meaning 'to' or 'up to a point in time', and entered English through contact with Scandinavian settlers in the north of England during the Viking Age. So English ended up with two completely separate words, from two different source languages, that became perfectly identical twins — a phenomenon linguists call homonymy.
The farming 'till' has remained remarkably stable in meaning across more than a thousand years. In the earliest Old English texts, it already carried the sense of working the ground, and it has never drifted far from that core idea. This stability is partly because the act itself never changed — breaking up soil with a blade or plough is the same fundamental task today as it was in the Anglo-Saxon fields of the eighth century. Few English words can claim such an unbroken connection between their form and their function.
There is also a noun form, 'till', referring to a cash drawer or money box — but this is a third, completely separate word, likely derived from Middle English 'tillen', meaning to draw out or pull. This word gave us the familiar 'till' behind every shop counter. So English has at least three distinct words all spelled 'till', each arriving by a different route, which makes this short, humble word one of the most quietly complex in the language.
The agricultural verb also gave English the related noun 'tillage', meaning the practice or result of cultivating land, which entered English in the 15th century following the French pattern of forming abstract nouns with the suffix '-age'. Similarly, a 'tiller' — someone who tills — became a common word for a farmworker, though today the same word is more often used for a lever that steers a boat, which is yet another unrelated 'tiller' from Old French 'telier', meaning a weaver's beam. English has a habit of collecting homophones and heaping them on top of each other, and 'till' and 'tiller' are among the most extreme examples of this tendency in the entire language.