beef

Word History: As has often been remarked, the great social disparities of medieval European society are revealed by the Modern English words for different sorts of meat. In medieval England, meats like beef, pork, veal, and mutton were presumably more often eaten by the educated and wealthy classes—most of whom could speak French or at least admired French culture—and the Modern English terms for these meats are uniformly of French origin. (The French sources of the English words are now spelled bœuf, porc, veau, and mouton, and the French words can refer both to the animal and to the meat it provides.) The English-speaking peasants who actually raised the animals—and who presumably subsisted on mostly vegetarian fare—continued to use the original Germanic words ox, swine, calf, and sheep when talking in the barnyard, and so the animals themselves have kept their native names to this day. One such Germanic word is actually related etymologically to its French counterpart. Cow comes from Old English cū, which is descended from the Indo-European root *g^wou-, "cow." This root has descendants in most of the branches of the Indo-European language family. Among those descendants is the Latin word bōs, "cow," whose stem form, bov-, eventually became the Old French word buef, the source of English beef.