especially: a widely cultivated cereal grass (A. sativa)
b
: a crop or plot of the oat
also: the seed of an oat —usually used in plural but singular or plural in construction
2
archaic: a reed instrument made of an oat straw
Illustration of oat
oat 1a
Phrases
feel one's oats
: to act in a newly self-confident and often self-important manner
Examples of oat in a Sentence
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Options that include ingredients like vitamin E, oats and aloe are particularly good for this purpose.—Bestreviews, Mercury News, 17 June 2025 And at 77, Jones is still sowing the wildest of oats, bucking the narrative that edgy musicians need to settle into some kind of well-coiffed adult contemporary mold after crossing a certain age.—Joe Lynch, Billboard, 10 June 2025 Whole or halved walnuts are easy to sprinkle on top of oats and salads, or as a nutritious boost for baked treats like brownies.—Abby Norman, Verywell Health, 9 June 2025 Add them to a bowl of savory oats or mix them into other breakfast dishes, like omelets.
4.—Jillian Kubala, Health, 9 June 2025 See All Example Sentences for oat
Word History
Etymology
Middle English ote "the grain of the oat plant, the plant itself," going back to Old English āte (weak feminine noun), of uncertain origin
Note:
Old English āte has been compared with regional Dutch aate, oote "wild oats" (West and Zeeland Flanders), West Frisian and Groningen Dutch oat. (These contrast with Dutch haver, denoting cultivated oats, a reflex of the Common Germanic word for the grain.) Michiel de Vaan, in an addenda to the online etymologiebank.nl, believes that the Flanders words are semantic extensions of regional aat "food," of general Germanic origin (see eat entry 2), though this hypothesis would scarcely explain the Old English word. Jan de Vries (Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, Brill, 1971) hypothesizes that the Low Country words may have been borrowed from English.
First Known Use
before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a
Time Traveler
The first known use of oat was
before the 12th century
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