Beef is the meat of a cow. Roast beef, minced beef, a beef sandwich.
The animal is a cow and the meat is beef, which is one of the clearest marks of the Norman conquest in the language — the Anglo-Saxons kept the animals and the French-speaking lords ate the meat, so cow, sheep and pig are English and beef, mutton and pork are French. Note beef as slang for a grievance: what's your beef; and beef up, meaning to strengthen.
1nounbeefThe meat of a cow.
“We had roast beef with potatoes and gravy for Sunday lunch.”
2noungrievanceA grievance, in informal use.
“What's your beef with him? He's never done anything to you.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
beef is a meat.
Old French buef comes from Latin bos, an ox, from the same Proto-Indo-European root as cow. Beef and cow are the same ancient word arriving by two routes.
Middle English
bef
English, today
beef
Built from
From Middle English bef. From Middle English bef, borrowed from Anglo-Norman beof, Old French buef, boef (“ox”) (modern bœuf); from Latin bōs (“ox”), from Proto-Italic gʷōs, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European gʷṓws. a doublet of cow. Beef in the sense of “a grudge, argument” was originally an American slang expression:
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA