Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various grasses of the genus Avena, especially A. sativa, widely cultivated for their edible grains.
  • noun The grain of any of these plants, used as food and fodder.
  • noun A musical pipe made of an oat straw.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A cereal plant, Avena sativa, or its seed: commonly used in the plural in a collective sense.
  • noun Any species of Avena. The wild oat of Europe, A. fatua, is a weed of cultivation in many places; in California, where it abounds, it is extensively utilized as hay. The animal, fly, or hygrometric oat, A. sterilis, native in Barbary, has two long, strong, much-bent awns, which twist and untwist with changes of moisture, and so become a means of locomotion. Various species are more or less available for pasture.
  • noun A musical pipe of oat-straw; a shepherd's pipe; hence, pastoral song. See oaten pipe, under oaten.
  • noun Bromus secalinus.
  • noun Pharus latifolius.
  • To feed with oats; feed oats to.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) A well-known cereal grass (Avena sativa), and its edible grain, used as food and fodder; -- commonly used in the plural and in a collective sense.
  • noun obsolete A musical pipe made of oat straw.
  • noun (Bot.) A grass (Avena sterilis) much like oats, but with a long spirally twisted awn which coils and uncoils with changes of moisture, and thus gives the grains an apparently automatic motion.
  • noun (Zoöl.), [Prov. Eng.] the snow bunting; -- so called from its feeding on oats.
  • noun (Bot.) the name of several grasses more or less resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, Danthonia sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in parts of the United States.
  • noun [Slang] to feel lively and energetic.
  • noun to indulge in youthful dissipation.
  • noun (Bot.) a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable Widely cultivated cereal grass, typically Avena sativa.
  • noun countable Any of the numerous species, varieties, or cultivars of any of several similar grain plants.
  • noun usually as plural The seeds of the oat, harvested as a food crop.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun seed of the annual grass Avena sativa (spoken of primarily in the plural as `oats')
  • noun annual grass of Europe and North Africa; grains used as food and fodder (referred to primarily in the plural: `oats')

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English ote, from Old English āte.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English ote, from Old English āte, from Proto-Germanic *aitōn (“swelling”) (compare Old High German eiz ("abscess"), Dutch etter ("pus"), East Frisian eitel ("fast, raging"), Old Norse eitill ("nodule")), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁eid- (“to swell”) (compare Latin aemidus ("swollen, protuberant"), Old Church Slavonic ꙗдъ (jadŭ, "poison"), Ancient Greek οἰδέω (oideō, "to swell"), Old Armenian այտնում (aytnum, "to swell"), այտ (ayt, "cheek"), Sanskrit इन्दु (índu, "water drop"). For sense development, compare Ancient Greek oídax 'unripe fig' from oîdos 'swelling, tumor'.

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