Unlike other dictionaries, Wiktionary lists
tractor as a verb, with inflected forms
tractoring and
tractored. It gives a few meanings:
- (transitive, agriculture) To prepare (land) with a tractor.
- (intransitive) To drive a tractor.
- (transitive, science fiction) To move with a tractor beam.
- (transitive, medicine, archaic) To treat by means of tractoration, or Perkinism.
The OED doesn't give
tractor as a verb, but it does list
tractored as an adjective, as shown in the extract in the original post, and
tractoring as both a noun and an adjective. The Shorter Oxford also includes
tractoring, but not
tractored.
Examples of these words in use are not hard to find. Some early instances were in John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the novel, men with tractors are sent by the banks to clear farmland being repossessed from sharecroppers. The victims speak of being tractored off their farms:
"...Till we got tractored off, we was people with a farm.”
And then the dispossessed were drawn west—from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand.
"Tractoring for Women" is a hobby farming training course which recently won an award in South Australia, according to a story on the ABC website:
Tractoring for Women is designed to give participants the confidence to do basic things with a tractor such as swapping the forks for the bucket, attaching implements and moving around a property safely.
I'll add
tractored and
tractoring as rare words.
