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herd

UK/hɜːd/US/hɝd/
nounB13 meaningsCommon in everyday speech and writing · #3,031 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: herds, herding, herded

A herd is a big group of grazing animals moving and feeding together. Fifty cows walking single file down the lane at milking time, a herd of elephants at a waterhole, a herd of deer that lifts its heads all at once when you step on a twig.

Herd is a verb as well: you herd cattle into a field, and stewards herd people through a gate at a festival. Aimed at people, the herd is an insult — herd mentality is doing what everyone else does without thinking it through, and to follow the herd is exactly that. Herd immunity is the public health term for when enough of a population is protected that a disease stops spreading. Keep herd for grazing animals: birds come in flocks, fish in schools, wolves in packs. And watch the spelling, because herd and heard sound identical.

Alex Gaylon from USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of herd

  1. 1nounherdA large group of animals of one kind that live and feed together.B1~62%

    “A herd of buffalo crossed the road and stopped the traffic.”

    synonyms: drove, flock

  2. 2nouncrowdOrdinary people thought of as a mass that follows without thinking.B2~15%

    “He was proud of never running with the herd.”

    synonyms: crowd, masses

  3. 3verbmoveTo move animals or people together in one direction.B1~23%

    “The guides herded us onto the bus before the rain started.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

herd is a group of animals.

Phrases it lives in

  • follow the herd — to do whatever everyone else is doing instead of deciding for yourself

Where it comes from

Herd comes through Middle English herde from Old English heord, and behind that stand Proto-Germanic herdō and a Proto-Indo-European root, (s)kerdʰ-, meaning a file, a row, a herd. The Old English word carried the animals and the keeping of them at once: the flock and the care of the flock. German still has Herde and Danish hjord. That old double sense is the pair the modern noun and verb now split between them.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *(s)kerdʰ- — file, row, herd

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *herdō — herd

  3. Proto-West Germanic

    *herdu

  4. Old English

    hierd

  5. Middle English

    herde

  6. English, today

    herd

Built from

  • heord · Old English — herd, flock; keeping, care, custody

From Middle English herde, heerde, heorde, from Old English hierd, heord (“herd, flock; keeping, care, custody”), from Proto-West Germanic herdu, from Proto-Germanic herdō (“herd”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kerdʰ- (“file, row, herd”). Cognate with German Herde, Danish hjord, Swedish hjord. Non-Germanic cognates include Albanian herdhe (“nest”) and Serbo-Croatian krdo.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather, Farm & Countryside, Dinosaurs & Prehistory

Practise this word

herd in the wild

  • A herd is a social group of certain animals of the same species, either wild or domestic.

    Herd

  • The form of collective animal behavior associated with this is called herding.

    Herd

  • The term refers to behavior in animals in herds, packs, bird flocks, fish schools, etc.

    Herd behavior

  • Mongolian women had a higher social status than women in many other East Asian societies, but were considered unable to herd cattle and possibly horses.

    Women in Mongolia

  • Pressure on federal agencies from the 1930s on led to a series of policies which severely reduced herd numbers.

    Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971

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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.