Cattle

How to spell cattle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cattle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cattle mean?

1. nounLarge domesticated bovine farm animals such as cows, bulls and oxen, kept for meat, milk or labour.

Cattle in a sentence

• The farmer drove his cattle into the lower field before the storm.

• A herd of cattle blocked the narrow country road for several minutes.

Where does cattle come from?

Language of origin: French

Cattle came into English in the 1200s from Anglo-Norman and Old French catel, a regional form of chatel, which meant 'property' or 'possessions' of any kind. That word descended from the Medieval Latin capitale, meaning 'wealth' or 'principal sum', which itself rests on the Latin caput, literally 'head'. The link runs through the old habit of counting a person's wealth by the number of animals they owned, so 'heads' of livestock came to stand for property itself. Over time the broad sense of 'movable goods' narrowed in English to the farm animals that were the most valuable movable property: oxen, cows and bulls. The very same root sits inside 'capital', 'chattel' and even 'captain', which is why the spelling keeps the hard 'c' and the doubled 't' that marks the short vowel.

How the word is built

• catt- (from Old French catel: property, livestock)
• -le (noun ending)