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reindeer

UK/ˈɹeɪndɪə/US/ˈɹeɪndɪɹ/
nounA2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #4,538 of 15,258neutral

A reindeer is a deer of the far north with branching antlers. A herd of reindeer, reindeer moss, pull the sleigh.

It is the only deer in which both sexes grow antlers, and the males drop theirs in early winter — so the team pulling the sleigh at Christmas would all be female. In North America the wild ones are called caribou and the herded ones reindeer. The plural has no s.

Are G Nilsen · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of reindeer

  1. 1nounreindeerA deer of the far north with branching antlers.A2+

    “In Lapland, tourists can ride in sleighs pulled by reindeer.”

reindeer is an animal.

Where it comes from

Old Norse hreindyri is hreinn, the animal, plus dyr, a beast. The deer part was already there in Norse.

  1. Old Norse

    hreindýri — reindeer

  2. Middle English

    reyndere

  3. English, today

    reindeer

Built from

  • hreinn · Old Norse — reindeer
  • dýr · Old Norse — animal

From Middle English reyndere, reynder, rayne-dere, from Old Norse hreindýri (“reindeer”), from hreinn (“reindeer”) + dýr (“animal”). Compare Dutch rendier (“reindeer”), German Rentier (“reindeer”), Swedish rendjur (“reindeer”), Danish rensdyr (“reindeer”) and French renne (“reindeer”). Related also to displaced Old English hrān (“reindeer”). Unrelated to rein.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

reindeer in the wild

  • In some traditional Christmas legends, Santa Claus's reindeer pull a sleigh through the night sky to help Santa Claus deliver gifts to good children on Christmas Eve.

    Reindeer

  • Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a fictional reindeer created in 1939 by Robert L.

    Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

  • The Swimming Reindeer is a 13,000-year-old Magdalenian sculpture of two swimming reindeer conserved in the British Museum.

    Swimming Reindeer

  • In the course of the journey, Sven meets other reindeer.

    Sven (Frozen)

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.