| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  b f |
| NOUN: | Inflected forms: pl. beeves ( bvz) or beef
1a. A full-grown steer, bull, ox, or cow, especially one intended for use as meat. b. The flesh of a slaughtered full-grown steer, bull, ox, or cow. 2. Informal Human muscle; brawn. 3. Inflected forms: pl. beefs
Slang A complaint. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: beefed, beef·ing, beefs
Slang To complain. | | PHRASAL VERB: | beef up Informal To make or become greater or stronger: beef up the defense budget. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Old French buef, from Latin b s, bov-. See gwou- in Appendix I. | | WORD HISTORY: | That beef comes from cows is known to most, but the close relationship between the words beef and cow is hardly household knowledge. Cow comes via Middle English from Old English c , which is descended from the Indo-European root *gwou–, also meaning “cow.” This root has descendants in most of the branches of the Indo-European language family. Among those descendants is the Latin word bs, “cow,” whose stem form, bov-, eventually became the Old French word buef, also meaning “cow.” The French nobles who ruled England after the Norman Conquest of course used French words to refer to the meats they were served, so the animal called c by the Anglo-Saxon peasants was called buef by the French nobles when it was brought to them cooked at dinner. Thus arose the distinction between the words for animals and their meat that is also found in the English word-pairs swine/pork, sheep/mutton, and deer/venison. What is interesting about cow/beef is that we are in fact dealing with one and the same word, etymologically speaking.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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