Rother

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Obsolete term for cattle, especially horned oxen kept for labour or meat ; a river in southern England after which a local district takes its name
2. An old word for herds of horned cattle, particularly oxen ; a watercourse in the south of England that gives its name to a nearby district
3. Archaic name for livestock such as horned oxen ; a southern English river that lends its title to a surrounding area

Etymology: "Rother" is an old English word for a herd of cattle, and it has a second, unrelated life as a word for the steering device on a ship. The two entries share a spelling only by coincidence, which is the surprising part. The cattle sense descends from Old English "hrīþer," meaning "neat" or "ox," which came from a Germanic root shared with Dutch "rund" ("bovine") and German "Rind" ("bovine; beef"). Over the Middle English period the word wore down into the forms "rother" and "ruther," and it was used for cattle collectively. The ship sense is a separate word altogether. It comes from Old English "rōþor," meaning "rudder," which is also the source of the modern word "rudder." Because both words passed through English with nearly identical sounds and spellings, they collided in later dictionaries, and the cattle sense has largely faded from everyday use, surviving mainly in older writing and regional dialect.