oat

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English ote, plural otes, oten,^[2][3][4] inherited from Old English āte, plural ātan.^{[5][6][4][7][8]} The Old English variant ǣte shows i-mutation and lies behind Middle English ete.^[5] Hoad, the Shorter Oxford and the Oxford Dictionary of English call the word peculiar to English and of unknown origin,^[4][7][9] and Weekley knew no cognates.^[10] The revised OED, however, sets it beside West Frisian oat, Dutch oot and regional Dutch ate and ote, all meaning wild oat, and suggests, as uncertain, the same Indo-European base as Ancient Greek οἰδέω (oidéō, “to swell”).^[5] Liberman, too, rejects the view that the word is isolated: of the explanations offered he thinks the best is the one that relates it to Old Norse eitill (“nodule in stone”) and to the second part of Old High German araweiz (“pea”), though the origin of the German word is obscure; he denies any link with eat or goat and doubts a West Germanic substrate.^[11] Etymonline likewise mentions the Norse word, as possibly denoting a single grain.^[6] Orel reconstructs Proto-Germanic *aitōn, with Old Saxon eriwit (“pea”) and the Old High German word, and compares Ancient Greek οἴδαξ (oídax, “unripe fig”) for the sense.^[12] The usual Germanic name of the cereal is unrelated: Proto-Germanic *habran-, the source of Old Norse hafri, Dutch haver and the English word haver.^[6][3][10] Because oat, unlike wheat, barley or rye, is a countable noun whose mass sense needs the plural, the OED and the Oxford Dictionary of English think it first meant a single grain, perhaps because oats were eaten whole rather than as meal.^{[5][9][7][10]}

Earliest recorded meaning

In early Old English glossaries āte renders Latin lolium and avēna, for wild oats or darnel and for the cereal: the Épinal Glossary has it for the wild grass, and the Corpus Glossary for the cereal plant.^[5][8] Liberman dates the word to about 700.^[11] The grain itself, in the plural, is first recorded in Bald's Leechbook, also early Old English.^[5]

Semantic evolution

The Old English plural ātan kept its -n until the late 15th century; plurals in -s appear from the mid 13th century.^[5] The singular could serve as a mass noun in Middle English (about 1330 to 1475),^[5] but the plural became the usual form for the grain and the crop.^[5][7] Johnson's definition, "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people", is well known.^[6][10] Since the 16th century, to sow one's wild oats has meant to behave wildly when young, with the idea of sowing a weed in place of good grain, a crop one will regret;^[6][13][10] Weekley compares French folle avoine.^[10] The horses' feed gave to feel one's oats, to be lively or self-important, first recorded in Boston in 1831,^[5][6] and off one's oats, without appetite, in 1873.^[5][13] After Latin avēna, which meant both oats and a shepherd's pipe, poets from 1587 used oat for a pipe made of an oat straw.^[5][14] In the 1920s to get one's oats came to mean to have sex, chiefly in British use.^[6][13] Scottish and northern English have the form ait,^[7] and the English Dialect Dictionary records more than twenty dialect spellings.^[15]

Timeline

• early Old English – āte, a wild grass (the wild oat) and the cultivated plant, in the Épinal and Corpus glossaries.^[5]
• early Old English – plural, the grain of the oat, in Bald's Leechbook.^[5]
• before 1250 – Middle English ote, plural otes, oten, in a version of the Ancrene Riwle.^[3]
• c. 1330 – the singular as a mass noun (obsolete by 1475).^[5]
• 1560s – wild oats, youthful excesses, in the phrase about sowing them.^[6]
• 1587 – poetic, a shepherd's pipe made of an oat straw.^[5]
• 1598 – a single grain of oats.^[5]
• 1732 – verb, to feed a horse with oats (obsolete by 1855).^[5]
• 1831 – to feel one's oats, to be lively, originally American.^[5][6]
• 1857 – rhyming slang oats and chaff, a footpath.^[5]
• 1873 – off one's oats, having no appetite.^[5]
• 1923 – to have or get one's oats, to have sex, chiefly British.^[6]

Meanings

Noun

1. A hardy cereal grass, Avena sativa, grown in temperate regions for its grain.^[14][16][5]
2. (usually plural) The grain of this plant, used as food for people and for animals, especially horses: a sack of oats.^[14][5][16]
3. Any of several related wild grasses, especially the wild oat.^[14][5]
4. (poetic) A shepherd's pipe made from an oat straw.^[14][5]
5. feel one's oats: (informal, chiefly US) to be lively, or to feel important.^[14][5]
6. off one's oats: having no appetite.^[5][13]

Verb

1. (archaic) To feed a horse with oats (in the OED, 1732–1855).^[16][5]

Word family

• oatlike
• oatcake
• oaten
• oater
• oatmeal
• animated oat
• oat cell
• oat grass

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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 c Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 27 28 Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ a b c d e Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ a b Bosworth, Joseph; Toller, T. Northcote (1898), An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press; Toller, T. Northcote (1921), Supplement
9. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ a b c d e f Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
11. ^ a b Liberman, Anatoly (2008), An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
12. ^ Orel, Vladimir (2003), A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, Leiden / Boston: Brill
13. ^ a b c d Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
14. ^ a b c d e f Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
15. ^ 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)
16. ^ a b c Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster