Sceap

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The Old English word for a woolly, herbivorous domesticated animal kept for its wool, meat and milk
2. An archaic term for the hoofed, wool-bearing farm animal that grazes in flocks across English pastures
3. Denoting the flock-living ruminant of early English, valued for its fleece and raised by herders and shepherds

Etymology: "Sceap" is the Old English word for a sheep, and it is the direct ancestor of modern "sheep." The sound change that separates them is a textbook case: in Old English, the vowel was a long "a" sound, pronounced roughly like the vowel in "ah" but fronted, and between the 12th and 15th centuries that vowel rose and lengthened into the "ee" sound we use today. Spellings in the surviving manuscripts vary widely, with "scep," "sceap," and "scæp" all attested, but the word has been "sheep" in its present form since the late Middle English period. The original Old English word was also the same whether it referred to one animal or many. Singular "sceap" and plural "sceap" looked identical, which is why "sheep" has never taken an -s in modern English. Plurals were marked by context or by a plural article or pronoun instead, a pattern shared by a handful of other Old English nouns such as "deer" and "swine," whose plurals likewise were not formed with an ending.