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cowherd

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: cowherds

A cowherd is somebody whose job is looking after cattle. The village cowherd, worked as a cowherd, the cowherd's boy.

The herd in it is the old word for a keeper of animals, which survives in shepherd and goatherd. It is a different word from coward, though the surname Coward comes from exactly this job.

Definitions of cowherd

  1. 1nouncowherdSomebody whose job is looking after cattle.C1

    “The young cowherd drove the cattle down from the hills at milking time.”

cowherd is a worker.

Where it comes from

Old English cuhierde is cow plus hierde, a keeper of animals, the same ending as in shepherd.

  1. Old English

    cūhierde

  2. Middle English

    couherde

  3. English, today

    cowherd

From Middle English couherde, from Old English cūhierde, equivalent to cow + herd. a doublet of Coward (the surname). Cognate with German Kuhhirte (“cowherd”). Compare shepherd, goatherd, swineherd, etc.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

cowherd in the wild

  • The name is also popularly addressed to Krishna, referring to his youthful activity as a cowherd boy.

    Govinda

  • The narratives of Gopala Krishna are set in the cowherd settlement of the Vraja region called Gokulam, where he is raised by his foster-parents, Nanda and Yashoda.

    Gopala-Krishna

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.