oat

UK/ˈəʊt/US/ˈoʊ̯t/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,423 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: oats

An oat is the grain that porridge is made from. Rolled oats, a field of oats, oat milk.

It is usually plural — oats — and the singular is rare outside botany. It grows where wheat will not, in cold wet places, which is why Scotland and Scandinavia built diets on it. Oat milk is now the commonest plant milk in British coffee shops.

Definitions of oat

1nounoatThe grain that porridge is made from.B1+
“She makes her own oat biscuits with honey and raisins.”

oat is a grain.

Where it comes from

Old English ate names the grain, of unknown origin, unrelated to the words for it in other Germanic languages.

Proto-Indo-European
*h₁eyd- — to swell
Proto-Germanic
*aitǭ — swelling; gland; nodule
Proto-West Germanic
*aitā
Old English
āte
Middle English
ote
English, today
oat

Built from

atter · English — poison

Middle English ote, from Old English āte, from Proto-West Germanic aitā, from Proto-Germanic aitǭ (“swelling; gland; nodule”), from Proto-Indo-European h₁eyd- (“to swell”). See English atter (“poison”). 1

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Food & Drink

Practise this word

oat in the wild

Oats are used for human consumption as oatmeal, including as steel cut oats or rolled oats.
Oat
Collectively known as the oats, they include some species which have been cultivated for thousands of years as a food source for humans and livestock.
Avena
All oats have edible seeds, though they are small and hard to harvest in most species.
Avena
Steel-cut oats are known as coarse oatmeal, Irish oatmeal, or pinhead oats.
Oatmeal
Bran is present in cereal grain, including rice, corn (maize), wheat, oats, barley, rye, and millet.
Bran

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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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oat