Referring to the coat (fur) of a sheep

Question

I am constructing a maths word problem and I would like to have differently coloured lambs as the main subject. However, I am not sure about the following points:

• What language level is "ewe" and "lamb"?
• Is it preferable to write "fleece" or "wool"?
• Is it correct to say "brown fleeced lamb" at all? Or better "brown-fleeced lamb"?

The target audience is young adults (20+) in an ESL environment.

Aftermath (pun intended): My initial question is indeed a very bad one. Introducing real world examples and trying to express it in a rather fancy way with rather uncommon words does not help any student. I now realise: Word problems in maths should be devoid of any applications, since it diverts attention from the intended computation exercise. As you see in the comments and answers, it was more interesting to contextualise my initial question in an unrelated way or interpreting more into it than intended or necessary. Same would go for students, I think. Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how complicated the rules are for such word constructs and what the expectations are. Thanks to anyone who invested in this discussion. I learned a lot.

Answer 1

Based on thirty years of teaching English to Italian learners, I would expect students at an Intermediate level (B1) to be very familiar with the terms:

• sheep
• lamb
• wool

Learners at Upper-Intermediate level (B2) might be familiar with the following terms if they have studied the vocabulary of agriculture and farm animals; not all reference/course books cover this topic. The OP might have to translate these terms in the students' mother tongue, which is the quickest way, but not necessarily the best. However, since the list is short, and the class is made up of 20-year olds, it shouldn't be a problem.

• ewe
• ram
• fleece

The easiest way to describe the colour of sheep wool is just saying the colour of the wool or animal.

Three black sheep/lambs = black wool/ fleeces
Three brown sheep/lambs = brown wool/ fleeces
Four white ewes/rams = white wool/ fleeces

Answer 2

As a native speaker, I would find it odd to refer to a sheep/lamb/ewe as "black-fleeced" or "black-wooled", particularly the latter (since I don't think I have ever heard "wooled" used in any context). Normally you would just say "a black sheep", and it is understood that you are talking about the colour of the fleece, being the predominant colour of the animal (as in "Baa baa, black sheep"). If you wanted to indicate the colour of the skin instead, you would say e.g. "a black-faced sheep".

FWIW, for me if it's still on the animal, or has been removed but is still all in one piece, it's "fleece" and otherwise it's "wool". However, I would not be confident that "fleece" is widely known in an ESL context.

Answer 3

Having lived in four different (non-English speaking) European countries, I can attest that reasonably fluent speakers of English as a second language:

• almost always know the words lamb and wool;
• absolutely cannot be relied upon to know the words ewe and fleece.

Therefore, I would recommend either avoiding the latter two words or including an explanation. Accordingly, it is better to use wool than fleece in a case like this. I can't think of any connotation of fleece that is not carried by wool and that is of importance when the information conveyed is simply the colour.

This also means that black-woolled (or -wooled) is preferable to black-fleeced. I believe I’m correct in saying that sheep farmers, for instance, are more likely to refer to their animals as white-woolled, black-woolled etc. than as white-fleeced etc.

Edit (on 2023-02-14, to add example):

The following example is from the ‘Farming’ section of the Irish Independent (February 08 2022):

Fifteen years ago, John Parke decided to add a pop of colour to his Texel flock when he bought his first black-woolled sheep.

As for using a hyphen or not, both are correct but the hyphen is usually recommended.

Answer 4

With your clarification that the target audience consists of English-language learners (ELLs), I would submit that the word "ewe" is unlikely to be familiar to most of them. A few will have encountered the word if a teacher emphasized animal names, and a few may have seen it in a list of homophones ("you"/"ewe"/"U" -- which may have taught them the pronunciation more than the meaning of the word). Apart from these possibilities, the word has little exposure in everyday English.

That said, by all means feel free to teach it.

Regarding the hyphenation question, "brown fleeced lamb" appears to me as if a comma was dropped, and implies the brown lamb had been fleeced. Saying "brown-fleeced lamb" makes more sense, because now "brown" is shown to be connected to the fleece, and not to the lamb, i.e. the lamb's fleece is brown.

Note: I have fewer than 20 years' experience teaching ELLs, largely in Asia where sheep are rarely seen.