row [OE] The sense ‘an orderly line’ is recorded from Old English. Row meaning ‘to propel with oars’ is also Old English, but is a different word that goes back to a root shared also by Latin remus ‘oar’. The kind of row that results from a heated argument is a different word again, with a different pronunciation. It turned up in English from an unknown source in the middle of the 18th century, when it was considered to be slang or ‘low’ speech. Rowdy [E19th] probably developed from this.