Bull

How to spell bull

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bull

What does bull mean?

1. nounAn adult male of cattle or certain other large animals.
2. nounAn investor who expects prices to rise and buys in anticipation.
3. nounA formal edict or official letter issued by the Pope.

Bull in a sentence

• The farmer kept one bull for breeding the herd.

• As a confirmed bull, she kept buying shares despite the warnings.

• The pope issued a bull condemning the practice in 1520.

• A charging bull knocked the gate clean off its hinges.

• Every bull in the market was betting the rally would continue.

• Historians studied the ancient bull sealed with lead.

Where does bull come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word reaches back to a Germanic root that also gave us 'bellow', and the connection makes sense: the animal was named for the deep roaring sound it makes. It appears in late Old English as 'bula' and was reinforced by the Old Norse 'boli', meaning a male of the cattle kind, brought over by Norse settlers. The everyday animal sense has stayed remarkably stable for a thousand years. The financial sense, a person who expects prices to rise, emerged in London stock-market slang in the early 1700s, possibly because a bull attacks by tossing its horns upward. A quite separate strand, the 'papal bull' meaning an official edict, comes from a completely different source: the Latin 'bulla', meaning the round leaden seal that authenticated such a document, so two unrelated histories happen to share the same modern spelling.

How the word is built

• bull (Old English/Old Norse root for the male bovine, related to 'bellow')