Meolcian

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To extract milk from a cow, goat, or other animal by hand or with a machine
2. Drawing the milk out of a dairy animal's udder, as an Old English farming task
3. Taking milk from a female animal, especially for use as food or in dairying

Etymology: Old English "meolcian" meant "to milk," the action of drawing milk from an animal. It is the verb built from the older noun "meolc," which later shifted to "milc" and gave modern English "milk." Because the verb was formed from the noun, English speakers were milking cows with a word that named the liquid first. The root is shared across the Germanic languages and reaches back much further. Old Norse had "mjólka," Dutch has "melken," and German has "melken," all from the same ancestral stem. Its relatives in other families are older still: Latin "mulgere" ("to milk") and Greek "amelgein" come from the same source. Because the word was inherited in English rather than borrowed, it has been part of the language since the earliest written records.