Vet

How to spell vet

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce vet

What does vet mean?

1. nounA person qualified to treat the diseases and injuries of animals.
2. verbTo examine someone or something carefully to check their suitability or accuracy.
3. nounA former member of the armed forces, especially one who has served in wartime.

Vet in a sentence

• noun

  The vet confirmed that the puppy needed a course of antibiotics.

• verb

  The agency will vet every applicant before sending them to clients.

• noun

  The parade honoured every vet who had served in the war.

• noun

  We booked the cat in to see the vet for its annual vaccinations.

• verb

  Editors vet each article for factual errors before publication.

• noun

  As a decorated vet, he received support from the local hospital.

Where does vet come from?

Language of origin: Latin

As the animal-doctor sense, 'vet' is a clipping that first appeared in English in the early 1860s, shortening 'veterinary surgeon' or 'veterinarian'. Those longer words trace back to the Latin veterinarius, meaning a person who treats cattle and beasts of burden, which itself derives from veterinae, the working animals of a farm. The verb sense, meaning to examine carefully, grew directly out of this: a horse was 'vetted' before a sale or race, that is, checked over by the vet, and by the early 1900s the idea had widened to scrutinising people, documents, or plans for soundness. A separate but identical-looking 'vet' is the American clipping of 'veteran', which comes from the Latin vetus, meaning 'old', and so describes a person seasoned by long service. Because all these senses collapse into the same three letters, the spelling itself is trivial; the only real choice is which meaning the context demands.

How the word is built

• vet (clipped form of 'veterinary'/'veterinarian', ultimately from Latin veterinarius 'relating to beasts of burden')