byre

UK/ˈbaɪə/US/ˈbaɪɚ/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: byres

A byre is a shed for cattle. The old byre, a stone byre, convert the byre.

It is a northern British and Scottish word where the rest of the country says cowshed. A byre is now more often a holiday cottage than a building with any cattle in it.

Definitions of byre

1nounbyreA shed for cattle.C2
“The byre had not held a cow since about 1978.”

byre is a building.

Also accepted in games: cowshed

Where it comes from

Old English byre means a shed or hut and is related to bower.

Old English
byre#Etymology_5
Middle English
bire
English, today
byre

From Middle English bire, bier, byr, from Old English byre#Etymology_5.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Farm & Countryside

Practise this word

byre in the wild

In mainland Europe, however, barns were often part of integrated structures known as byre-dwellings (or housebarns in US literature).
Barn
The medieval Old Frisian longhouse (or byre dwelling) consisted of a residence with a byre for cattle built immediately behind it.
Frisian farmhouse
Sometimes an existing byre was incorporated into a newly erected Frisian barn, which was built over the old structure.
Old Frisian longhouse
The building in question was constructed in the 1950s as a cow byre, which the government listed without prior research.
Portbraddon
If the living quarters are only combined with a byre, whereas the cereals are stored outside the main building, the house is called a byre-dwelling.
Housebarn

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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