oat

/oʊt/

/əʊt/

Other forms: oats

An oat is a cereal grain, the seed of a plant that grows like a tall grass in fields. Your dad might love to bake with oats.

You're most likely to see the noun oat in its plural form — oats. Oats are grown for both animal feed and human consumption. If you ever eat oatmeal for breakfast, you know what an oat looks like, at least in its rolled, flake-like form. The Old English root is ate, "grain of the wild oat plant." The source of this word isn't known for sure, though it may come from the Old Norse eitill, "nodule" or "single grain."

Definitions of oat

1. noun

   annual grass of Europe and North Africa; grains used as food and fodder (referred to primarily in the plural: `oats')
   types:

   Avena sativa, cereal oat

   widely cultivated in temperate regions for its edible grains

   Avena fatua, wild oat, wild oat grass

   common in meadows and pastures

   Avena barbata, slender wild oat

   oat of southern Europe and southwestern Asia

   Avene sterilis, animated oat, wild red oat

   Mediterranean oat held to be progenitor of modern cultivated oat

   type of:

   cereal, cereal grass

   grass whose starchy grains are used as food: wheat; rice; rye; oats; maize; buckwheat; millet
2. noun

   seed of the annual grass Avena sativa (spoken of primarily in the plural as `oats')
   type of:

   cereal, food grain, grain

   foodstuff prepared from the starchy grains of cereal grasses