OAT • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Oat

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noun

Oat n. (pl. oats)

1.

(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.

2.

A musical pipe made of oat straw. (Obs.)

Animated oats or Animal oats (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.

Oat fowl (Zool.), the snow bunting; so called from its feeding on oats. (Prov. Eng.)

Oat grass (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.

To feel one's oats,

(a)

to be conceited or self-important. (Slang)

(b)

to feel lively and energetic.

To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation.

Wild oats (Bot.), a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.

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Etymology of 'Oat'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Oat" Quotes from Famous Books

... narrow and steep, the rocks sharp and ragged, the cactus thick and treacherous. Many years ago Mexicans placed goats on the island for the need of shipwrecked sailors, and these goats have traversed the wild oat slopes until they are like a network of trails. Every little space of grass has its ...

— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... seven ounces; diluted with barley or oat gruel, two to three ounces; after the thirteenth month, ...

— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt

... very much as a railroad train emerges from a tunnel. A swift glance at their surroundings showed Jack that they had floated into a sort of natural basin amid some wild, bare-looking hills. The banks of this basin were clothed with a sort of wild oat and interspersed with a small blue wild flower. Here and there were clumps of chapparal. But what pleased the lad most was the fact that, although not far from them a rude hut stood upon the bank, there was so far no sign of human occupancy ...

— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering

... home with the men of the bivouac, as they had been through the day with the detachment from the sea-board. A few minutes were enough to draw out sheep-skins for them to lie upon, a skin of wine for their thirst, a bunch of raisins and some oat-cakes for their hunger; a few minutes more had told the news which each party asked from the other; and then these sons of the sea and these war-bronzed Philistines were as much at ease with each other as if they had served under the same ...

— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale

... she was late for one of her meals, for Annie had no very correct sense of the lapse of time, and auntie had declared she should go fasting, it was yet not without her connivance that rosy-faced Betty got the child the best of everything that was at hand, and put cream in her milk, and butter on her oat cake, Annie managing to consume everything with satisfaction, notwithstanding the hurdy-gurdy accompaniment of her aunt's audible reflections. And Brownie was always friendly; ever ready on any serious emergency, when auntie's ...

— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

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