Teats

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Anatomical structures on mammals that produce milk for feeding young
2. Nipple-like projections found in both genders of some animals
3. A playful term sometimes used to reference small portions or bits of something edible

Etymology: "Teats" is simply the plural of "teat", and the singular has a sound-symbolic past: its ancestors look like baby talk for the breast. The Proto-Germanic form "*tittaz" meant "teat; nipple; breast", and its origin is expressive, meaning it was built from the kind of repeated, easily babbled syllables that infants and nursing mothers share. Relatives of the same root appear across the Germanic and Romance languages, including Old High German "zizza", the source of modern German "Zitze", and Italian "zizza". The word arrived in English through Old French "tete" (compare modern French "tette"), which came from a Frankish form. Middle English adopted it and it largely pushed out the native Old English "titt", the older English cognate of the same root. That older word survived in a narrower, more informal sense, now best known as "tit". The plural "teats" simply names more than one of these projections, which is why the term is used for animals of both sexes, not only for mammary glands of females.

Synonyms: nipples, udders, mammary glands, teat, nipple