Other forms: bulls
A bull is the male of cattle. A prize bull, the bull charged, a bull in a field.
An uncastrated adult male, kept for breeding and famous for being dangerous — more people are killed by cattle than by any other British animal, and bulls do most of it. The red cape story is wrong: cattle are colour-blind to red and react to the movement. In finance a bull market is a rising one. Note bull in a china shop; take the bull by the horns; and papal bull, an unrelated word from the seal.
1nounbullThe male of cattle.
“The bull lowered its horns and charged at the gate.”
2nounrisingA rising market.
“Investors made a lot of money during the long bull market.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
bull is an animal, or a rising market.
Old English bula and Old Norse boli both come from a Germanic root about swelling. The papal bull is a different word entirely, from Latin bulla, a seal.
Middle English
bole
English, today
bull
Built from
From Middle English bole. From Middle English bole,bul,bule, from a conflation of Old English bula (“bull, steer”) and Old Norse boli, both from Proto-Germanic bulô (“bull”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰl̥no-, from bʰel- (“to blow, swell up”). Cognate with West Frisian bolle, Dutch bul, German Low German Bull, German Bulle, Swedish bulla; also Old Irish ball (“limb”), Latin follis (“bellows, leather bag”), Albanian bolle (“testicles”), Ancient Greek φαλλός (“penis”). Of sense 11, (a man or boy), derived from the Philadelphia English pronunciation of boy, which is practically a homophone of bull.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA