Other forms: calves
Your calf is the thick muscle at the back of your lower leg, between the knee and the ankle. It is the part that burns on the way up a hill and the one that cramps you awake at three in the morning.
The same spelling is also a young cow, and both senses make the plural calves. A cow in calf is pregnant, to calve is to give birth — and a glacier calves too, when a slab of ice breaks off into the sea. Young elephants, whales and seals are calves as well. Calfskin, the soft leather in old book bindings, comes from the animal and not the leg. In the gym people say calf muscle and calf raises, and the tight cord below it is the Achilles tendon.
1nouncalfThe thick muscle at the back of the lower leg, below the knee.
“He pulled a calf muscle in the second half.”
2nounbullA young cow or bull; also a young elephant, whale or seal.
“The calf stayed close to its mother all afternoon.”
3nounsoftSoft leather made from the skin of a young cow.
“The book was bound in calf and stamped in gold.”
calf is a muscle of the leg.
Calf runs back through Middle English calf to Old English cælf, West Saxon ċealf, and Proto-West Germanic *kalb from Proto-Germanic *kalbaz. Every Germanic language has held on to a form of it for the young animal. Past Germanic the trail simply stops: nobody has worked out where the word came from.
Proto-Germanic
*kalbaz
Proto-West Germanic
*kalb
ang-ang
cælf
Middle English
calf
English, today
calf
From Middle English calf, from ang-ang cælf, calf (West Saxon ċealf), from Proto-West Germanic kalb, from Proto-Germanic kalbaz, further etymology unknown. 3
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Body & Health, Farm & Countryside