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An area of ground covered with short growing grass — the grass and the soil holding it, thought of as one surface. It is a formal and rather old-fashioned word. Today you find it in two places. In poems and older writing it means a stretch of lawn or field, often in the phrase 'the green sward': 'they lay down on the green sward'. And in farming, it is still a working technical term for the layer of grass in a field where animals graze — farmers talk about sward height, or the sward, meaning the grass their cows eat. So the same word is antique in a poem and ordinary in a farming report. Note what it does not mean: not one plant, not a garden lawn you would name in speech, and not the wild long grass of open country. A sward is the continuous carpet of it. It is normally singular, though 'swards' exists in farming writing. In everyday English, say 'grass' or 'lawn'; keep 'sward' for reading.
草皮、草地（覆蓋地面的一層短草，文言用法；農業上指牧草層）。
組成From Old English 'sweard', which meant a skin or a rind — the grass was thought of as the skin of the earth. Where it came from before that is not known.
原始詞典資料8 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Swardname
- 1
A surname.
swardnoun詞源 1/swɔːd/
- 1
Earth which grass has grown into the upper layer of; greensward, sod, turf; (countable) a portion of such earth.
- His eyes he op'nd, and beheld a field, / Part arable and tilth, whereon were Sheaves / New reapt, the other part ſheep-walks and foulds; / Ith' midſt an Altar as the Land-mark ſtood / Ruſtic, of graſſie ſord; […]
- There is a dale in Ida, lovelier / Than any in old Ionia, beautiful / With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean / Above the loud glenriver, which hath worn / A path thro' steepdown granite walls below / Mantled with flowering tendriltwine.
- 2
An expanse of land covered in grass; a lawn or meadow.
- It was not far from the house; but the ground sank into a depression there, and the ridge of it behind shut out everything except just the roof of the tallest hayrick. As one sat on the sward behind the elm, with the back turned on the rick and nothing in front but the tall elms and the oaks in the other hedge, it was quite easy to fancy it the verge of the prairie with the backwoods close by.
- [O]f a sudden the trees began to thin and the sward to spread out onto a broad, green lawn, where five cows lay in the sunshine and droves of black swine wandered unchecked.
- 3
obsoleteThe upper layer of the ground, especially when vegetation is growing on it.
- The roots of the Apple-tree, Olive, and Cypreſſe, lie very ebbe, and creepe hard under the ſourd of the ground.
- 4
dialectalThe rind of bacon or pork; also, the outer covering or skin of something.
swardverb詞源 1/swɔːd/
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To cover (ground, etc.) with sward.
- 2
Of ground, etc.: to be covered with sward; to develop a covering of sward.
- [Land...] will not sward again […]
- […] for the ground immediately after corn is many years before it swards, and […]
swardnoun詞源 2/swɔːd/
- 1
A homosexual man.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。