Calves

How to spell calves

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce calves

What does calves mean?

1. nounMore than one young cow or bull, or the young of certain other large mammals.
2. nounThe fleshy muscular parts at the back of the lower legs, below the knees.

Calves in a sentence

• The farmer moved the newborn calves into the warm barn.

• After the long hike her calves ached for two days.

• Two elephant calves stayed close to the herd at the watering hole.

• Cycling uphill every morning gave him strong calves.

Where does calves come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is the plural of 'calf', which traces back to the Old English 'cealf', meaning a young cow. The same Germanic root gave Dutch 'kalf' and German 'Kalb', and it is one of those very old native English nouns that keep an irregular plural where the final 'f' softens to a 'v' sound before the ending, just as 'leaf' becomes 'leaves' and 'half' becomes 'halves'. The anatomical sense, the fleshy back of the lower leg, comes from a separate Old Norse word 'kalfi' that was borrowed during the Viking age, and the two words simply fell together in form. That shared spelling is why the plural is 'calves' in both meanings, and the f-to-v swap is the trap, since the singular ends in a plain 'f'.

How the word is built

• calf (root noun)
• -es (plural ending, with the f changing to v before the suffix)