Sheep
nounA woolly domesticated grazing animal kept for its wool, meat, or milk.
How to spell sheep
5 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce sheep
What does sheep mean?
- nounA woolly domesticated grazing animal kept for its wool, meat, or milk.
Sheep in a sentence
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The farmer moved his flock of sheep to the lower field.
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A single sheep had wandered through the broken fence.
Where does sheep come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Sheep comes from the Old English scēap (also spelled scep), the everyday word for the woolly grazing animal that farmers kept across Anglo-Saxon England. It traces back to a West Germanic root, seen also in the Dutch schaap and the German Schaf, which all referred to the same domesticated animal. One curious feature carried straight through from the old language is that sheep has never developed a separate plural; one sheep and a hundred sheep look exactly alike, a holdover from a class of Old English nouns that did not add an ending. The animal was so central to the wool trade that words like 'shepherd' (literally a sheep-herd) grew up around it. The 'ee' spelling reflects a long vowel that was once written with a different letter combination but settled into the modern double-e during the Middle English period.
How the word is built
- sheep (a single root word from Old English scēap; the form is identical in singular and plural)
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