Tod – noun (1): a male fox, a dog, a reynard; a fox, chiefly in Scotland;
example, ‘the tod, or fox, is their totem, and him they diligently
pursue’; tod, someone like a fox, a crafty person; noun (2) archaic, an
English unit of weight for wool, one equal to 28 pounds or 12.7
kilograms but varying locally; noun (3), a load, a clump, a bushy
mass, especially of ivy; noun (4): meaning death, or cessation of life;
noun (5) used in the British expression: on one’s tod meaning to be on
one’s own, originating in nineteenth century rhyming slang from Tod
Sloan/alone, after Tod Sloan, a jockey; word origin: from the Middle
English todd, todde; akin to the Old High German zotta, meaning tuft
of hair; to the East Frisian dialect, todde, for rag or small load; or to
the Old Norse, toddi, meaning piece or slice; tod, apparently cognate
with the Starland Frisian todde, meaning bundle; else the Swedish
todd, a mass of wool; verb: to tod, now obselete, meaning to weigh, to
yield in tods; third-person singular simple present, he/she tods;
present participle, todding; simple past and past participle, he/she
todded; also found in place names: Todmorden, a Yorkshire market
town at the confluence of three valleys; El-Tod, a village and
archaeological site in Egypt; Mount Tod, in British Columbia,
Canada, also Mount Tod near Amundsen Bay, Antarctica;
commercial name: TOD, a luxury brand of leather shoes and
handbags; in aviation, acronym of the term top of descent; trade name
for a vehicle four-wheel drive system torque on demand; Tournament of
Death, annual professional wrestling event; Türkiye Ormancilar
Derneg˘i, the Foresters’ Association of Turkey; tod, anagram of dot, as
in dot-to-dot, a numbered drawing game for children; English words
containing tod: today, toddle off, toddy; foreign words containing
tod: in German, das Tod (death), der Todesangst (a fear of dying);
in Dutch, Todo, contraction of toegevoegd docent (additional teacher);
in Spanish, todos (everyone), todo (everything), en todas partes
(everywhere).
Paul Stephenson has three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016) and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He co-curates Poetry in Aldeburgh and
interviews poets at paulstep.com.