Cow

How to spell cow

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cow

What does cow mean?

1. nounThe mature female of cattle, kept for milk or meat.
2. verbTo frighten someone into submission with threats or a show of force.

Cow in a sentence

• noun

  The farmer led each cow into the milking shed at dawn.

• verb

  The manager tried to cow the new staff into working unpaid overtime.

• noun

  A single cow can produce many litres of milk every day.

• verb

  Aggressive emails will not cow the committee into changing its decision.

Where does cow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The animal name comes straight from Old English cū, the word the Anglo-Saxons used for the adult female of domestic cattle. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form kwon, which also produced the German Kuh and the Dutch koe, and ultimately to an ancient Indo-European root gwous that meant simply 'ox' or 'cattle'. That same prehistoric root surfaces in Latin bos and Greek bous, giving English the borrowed prefix in words like 'bovine'. The unrelated verb meaning 'to intimidate or subdue' is much younger, appearing in English around the early 1600s and probably borrowed from the Old Norse kuga, meaning 'to oppress or force'. Because the noun is so old and short, its spelling stayed simple, and the verb merely borrowed the convenient three-letter shape that was already established.

How the word is built

• cow (a single, indivisible root from Old English cū)