Oats

How to spell oats

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce oats

What does oats mean?

1. nounThe seeds of a cereal grass, eaten as food and used as animal feed.

Oats in a sentence

• He soaked a bowl of oats overnight for breakfast.

• Rolled oats are the main ingredient in flapjacks.

Where does oats come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Oats comes from the Old English word āte, the name for the cereal grass and its grain, with the plural form ātan giving us the familiar collective use we still favour today. The deeper origins of āte are genuinely murky; unlike many grain names it has no clear relatives in the other Germanic languages, which has long puzzled scholars who expect such an everyday food word to have obvious cousins. Some have linked it to ideas of a 'grain' or 'kernel', but no derivation is certain, so the word is best regarded as a native English term of obscure background. By the medieval period oats were a staple animal feed and a poor person's porridge across Britain, which is why the plant looms so large in the language. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, and the chief modern trap is simply remembering that the grain is almost always written as a plural, oats, rather than the singular oat.

How the word is built

• oat (Old English āte: the cereal grain)
• -s (plural)