oxen

UK/ˈɒksən/US/ˈɑksən/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,065 of 15,258neutral

Oxen are cattle kept for pulling and heavy work. Slow, enormously strong, and patient.

The word is the plural of ox, and it is one of the last irregular plurals in English formed with -en, alongside children and brethren, which is why it looks so odd. An ox is usually a castrated bull, trained in pairs to a yoke. They pulled ploughs and carts across most of the world for thousands of years and still do in many places.

Definitions of oxen

1nounoxenCattle trained to pull ploughs and carts.B1+
“Two oxen were still working the top field.”

Where it comes from

Middle English
oxen
English, today
oxen

Built from

*uhsô · Proto-Germanic — ox

From Middle English oxen. From Middle English oxe, from Old English oxa, from Proto-West Germanic ohsō, from Proto-Germanic uhsô, nominative and accusative plural of uhsô (“ox”), equivalent to ox + -en.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 15 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

oxen in the wild

There are several types of yoke, used in different cultures, and for different types of oxen.
Yoke
A pair of oxen may be called a yoke of oxen, and yoke is also a verb, as in "to yoke a pair of oxen".
Yoke
The carucate or carrucate was a medieval unit of land area approximating the land a plough team of eight oxen could till in a single annual season.
Carucate
In Classical Arabic, the word means 'a yoke of oxen', implying the area of ground that could be tilled by oxen in a certain time.
Feddan
An ox (pl.: oxen), also known as a steer or bullock (in British, Australian, and Indian English), is a large bovine, trained and used as a draft animal.
Ox

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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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