flow: [OE] The prehistoric Indo-European *pleu-, ancestor of a heterogeneous range of English vocabulary, from fleet to plover, denoted ‘flow, float’. It had a variant form *plō-, which passed into Germanic as *flō-. This formed the basis of the Old English verb flōwan (whence modern English flow) and also of the noun flood. => fleet, flood, fowl, plover, pluvial