Ox

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A large castrated male bovine animal, trained to pull carts and plows or raised for its meat
2. A powerful bovine beast, typically a gelded bull, that is harnessed to haul heavy loads on farms
3. A castrated adult bull of the cattle family, traditionally kept as a draft animal for plowing and hauling

Etymology: The English "ox" is one of the oldest animal words in the language, and its ancestry runs back to a root shared by a whole family of Indo-European languages. Old English "oxa" descends from a Proto-Germanic form, "uhsô", which matches modern German "Ochse", Dutch "os" and West Frisian "okse". Looking further east, the same root gives Sanskrit "ukṣán" and Avestan "uxšan", both meaning bull, and it also appears in Welsh "ych", the one Celtic relative in the list, showing how widely the word was spread across the old Indo-European world. The word is also a source of a curious modern twist. "Oxygen" was coined in the late eighteenth century from Greek roots meaning "acid-former", and "ox" is a later clipping of that coinage, so the animal's name has been shortened from a chemical term. That is a reversal of the usual pattern, where a common word gives rise to a technical one.

Synonyms: bullock, steer