Goat

How to spell goat

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce goat

What does goat mean?

1. nounA hardy horned mammal kept on farms for its milk, meat, or hair.
2. nounInformally, the greatest performer of all time in a sport or field.

Goat in a sentence

• The farmer milked the goat before breakfast.

• Many fans consider that striker the goat of modern football.

• A goat climbed onto the rocky ledge above the path.

• The commentator called her the goat after another record-breaking season.

Where does goat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Goat descends from the Old English word 'gat', which named the familiar horned, hoofed farm animal kept for milk, meat, and hair. That form goes back to a shared Germanic ancestor, seen in the Dutch 'geit' and the German 'Geiss', and ultimately to a root that linguists reconstruct as meaning a young animal or kid. The original English word was feminine and referred chiefly to the she-goat, with a separate term used for the male; over time 'goat' broadened to cover the animal of either sex. The modern spelling settled with the 'oa' digraph during the Middle English period, replacing earlier forms like 'gate' and 'gote', which is why the vowel looks more elaborate than its single long sound suggests. In recent decades the word also took on a celebratory slang life as an acronym for 'greatest of all time', usually written in capitals as GOAT.

How the word is built

• goat (single Old English root, no affixes)