Oat
Oat (ōt) , noun
[Old English ote, ate, Anglo-Saxon āta, akin to Fries. oat. Of uncertain origin.]
1.
(Botany) 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. [Obsolete] — Milton
Collocations (6)
Animated oats or Animal oats (Botany) , 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 (Zoology) , the snow bunting; -- so called from its feeding on oats. [Provincial English]
Oat grass (Botany) , 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. — Thackeray
Wild oats (Botany) , a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.