Beef

How to spell beef

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beef

What does beef mean?

1. nounThe flesh of cattle used as food.
2. nounAn informal word for a complaint, grievance, or ongoing dispute.
3. verbTo add strength, substance, or numbers to something, usually followed by 'up'.

Beef in a sentence

• noun

  She braised the beef slowly with red wine and onions.

• noun

  His only beef with the new contract was the shorter notice period.

• verb

  The company plans to beef up security at the warehouse.

• noun

  The recipe calls for a kilogram of lean minced beef.

• noun

  The two managers had a long-running beef over the budget.

• verb

  They want to beef up the report with more detailed figures.

Where does beef come from?

Language of origin: French

Beef came into English from the Old French word boef, which meant 'ox' or 'cattle', and that French term descended in turn from the Latin bos (with its stem bov-), simply meaning 'ox' or 'cow'. The word arrived in the years after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when French-speaking nobles ruled England, and it slotted neatly into a famous pattern of English vocabulary: the live animal kept its native Anglo-Saxon name (cow, ox), while the meat served at the table took the French name. That same split gave us 'pork' beside 'pig' and 'mutton' beside 'sheep'. The very distant relative 'bovine' shares the same Latin bos root. The slang sense, meaning a complaint or a feud, is a much later American development from the late 1800s, and the spelling stays usefully simple: the long 'ee' vowel is written exactly as it sounds.

How the word is built

• beef (from Old French boef: ox, cattle)