groats

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English grotes,^[2][3] inherited from Old English grotan,^[1][4][5][6] a plural that survives only in one marginal note, where it is spelt gratan.^[1][7] The OED reads this as a blundered copy of the form with o, and rejects the often-cited form with a long vowel, which has no known etymology.^[1] It is related to grot (“particle, fragment; meal”),^[1][4][8][7] grēot (“sand, grit”), grytt (“coarse meal”) and grūt (“coarse meal”), the sources of grit, grits and grout,^[4][8] and to the second part of meregrota (“pearl”).^[9][10] Compare Dutch gort and German Grütze, which also mean "groats".^[1] Ayto traces the family to Proto-Indo-European *ghrēu- (“to rub, pound, crush”).^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

Hulled grain: the Old English recipe says átena gratan, groats of oats, in a passage written about 1200 in the margin of an 11th-century manuscript of the Leechdoms.^[1][7] Hoad, the Shorter Oxford and the Oxford Dictionary of English call the word late Old English,^[4][5][6] and Dictionary.com dates it to before 1100.^[11] Etymonline begins with the early 14th century.^[8]

Semantic evolution

Old English grot could mean both a particle and meal,^[7] and groats has kept the food sense ever since.^[1][2] The Middle English Dictionary records it from Durham accounts of the 1320s and 1330s, where groats were bought for the convent's pottage, and in a recipe of 1381 as otyn grotys.^[2] It could be made from oats, wheat, barley and formerly maize;^[1] Embden groats were crushed barley or oats.^[1] From 1669 to 1725 the word also meant naked oats.^[1] Scots used it in proverbial phrases of paying someone back, such as to give groats for pease and to get groats in kail, and to ken one's groats in other folks' kail, to recognize one's own handiwork.^[1][12] In Northumberland it also meant the broken scraps left by cattle in the byre.^[12] Etymonline adds a mid-15th-century sense "excrement in pellets",^[8] but the Middle English Dictionary enters that grotes separately, as from Old French crote (“pellet of dung”).^[2]

Timeline

• c. 1200 – hulled grain of oats, as gratan, in a marginal addition to an 11th-century manuscript.^[1][7]
• 1324–5 – grotis, hulled or crushed grain, in Durham accounts.^[2]
• 1669 – naked oats (obsolete by 1725).^[1]
• 1727 – the Scots phrase to give groats for pease, to pay someone back.^[1][12]

Meanings

Noun

1. Hulled, and often also crushed, grain, chiefly oats but also wheat or barley.^[9][1][5]
2. The parts of oat kernels used as food.^[9]

Related words

• grit
• grits
• grout
• gruel
• groat

Usage notes

Groats is not the plural of the old coin groat, though the two are spelled alike and the OED compares their pronunciation: the coin's name is from Middle Dutch groot (“great, thick”).^[1][2][3]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
2. ^ a b c d e f Kurath, Hans; Kuhn, Sherman M.; Lewis, Robert E., eds. (1952–2001), Middle English Dictionary, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; online edition ed. Frances McSparran et al. (2000–2018)
3. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
4. ^ a b c d Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d e Bosworth, Joseph; Toller, T. Northcote (1898), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Toller, T. Northcote (1921), Supplement
8. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
9. ^ a b c Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
10. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
11. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
12. ^ a b c Wright, Joseph, ed. (1898–1905), The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., Oxford: Henry Frowde; via EDD Online 4.0, University of Innsbruck (CC BY 4.0)