Foale

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A young horse or similar equine animal, especially one still nursing from its mother ; to give birth to such a young animal
2. The offspring of a horse, donkey or related animal in its first year ; to bear one of these young animals as a mare does
3. A youngster of the horse family, typically a newborn or very young creature ; to deliver such an animal from the mother's body

Etymology: "Foale" is simply an obsolete spelling of "foal," the young of a horse, and it reached English in its old form through Middle English, where spellings like "ffoole," "fole," and "fowle" all competed for the same word. The Old English form "fola" descends from a Proto-Germanic root, "*fulô," which means the same thing, and the chain goes back further still to a prehistoric root meaning "animal young." What makes the word notable is how widely that ancestral root spread. Its relatives run through nearly every Germanic language, from Dutch "veulen" and German "Fohlen" to Swedish "föl" and Icelandic "foli," and the same root shows up in other branches too. Latin "pullus," meaning "young animal," and Greek "poulári," meaning "foal," come from the same prehistoric source, so a German stable hand and a Roman farmer were, without knowing it, using words with a shared ancestor.