Cowboys

How to spell cowboys

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cowboys

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cowboys mean?

1. nounMen, typically on horseback, who herd and tend cattle, especially in the American West.
2. nounInformal British term for dishonest, unqualified, or careless workmen who do shoddy work.

Cowboys in a sentence

• The ranch hired three cowboys to drive the herd to market.

• The so-called cowboys left the bathroom half tiled and never returned for payment.

• The museum exhibit showed how cowboys branded and rounded up cattle.

• She warned her neighbour to avoid the cowboys who had overcharged for the roof repair.

Where does cowboys come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a plain compound of two very old English elements, 'cow' and 'boy', joined to mean a boy or man who tends cattle. 'Cow' descends from the Old English cu, a word for cattle that has close cousins across the Germanic languages and reaches back to an ancient root meaning simply a horned beast of the herd. 'Boy' is a Middle English word for a male servant or young man whose precise earlier history is debated, but which had settled into the sense of a youth by the time the compound formed. The word 'cowboy' is recorded in English from the 1700s for someone who minded cattle, and it took on its now-famous American sense of a mounted cattle herder of the western plains in the 1800s. The plural simply adds -s, so the only spelling point worth noting is that 'boy' keeps its -oy ending before the s rather than shifting to -ie.

How the word is built

• cow (Old English cu, female cattle)
• boy
• -s (plural marker)