Can "cattle" be singular?

Question

I've grown up on a farm, and my dad and his dad, apparently, always used "cattle" to refer to both the singular and plural forms of the domestic bovine. I've always assumed it's how the word "deer" is.

However, I've heard people say that this is incorrect and the singular is just "cow", but this has always offended us as a cow is a mother cattle, and is incorrect if you're referring to a steer, a bull, or a heifer.

So, is cattle singular as well as plural? If not, is there some general, non-gender-specific word that should be used instead?

Answer 1

Historically, cow refers to a female, and steer or bull refers to a male. The plurals of these are cows, steers and bulls. The 1896 edition of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (found on Google books) defines cow as:

1. The mature female of bovine animals.
2. The female of certain large mammals, as whales, seals, etc.

If you want to refer to more than one of this kind of animal, and don't want to specify the gender, you call them cattle. Cattle is often treated as an uncountable noun.¹ To specify three of them, you would say three head of cattle.

There is historically not a singular, non-gender-specific word for one head of cattle. Your father and grandfather used cattle as a singular to fill this gap. Other people are now using cow for this, and this usage is common enough to have made it to the dictionaries. I don't know whether it's common enough to be considered correct among farmers, however, or whether it's just us ignorant city-folk who use it.

¹ Update: Looking at Google Ngrams and books, I was surprised to find two cattle used instead of two head of cattle relatively often, although two head of cattle is the more common term.

Answer 2

Singular should be bovine, a cow is basically a female bovine, and bull or steer is a male. People started saying cow, I don't know why, in the 20Th century for some reason (I do not know why) and the correct name should be bovine, cattle (Bos Taurus), is just multiple bovines, but bovines works the same way. If you are saying a domestic bovine, then say ox/oxen . Hope this helps...I have general knowledge on "cows"

Answer 3

In Western Australia, in my youth (1960s), people on cattle stations called individual cattle a 'beast', especially when the sex was unknown. I'm not sure how widespread this was/is but WP says it's a known usage in (at least parts of) Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain.

Answer 4

In the 1950's and 60's in the county of Angus in Scotland where we had a farm with cattle, the singular of cattle; e.g. one far enough away for one not to know its sex; was called a 'cattle-beast'. That sounds a bit clumsy but is quite precise, in that it states that the animal being spoken of is bovine but sex is undetermined.

Answer 5

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, cattle is the plural of cow in US English and cow refers to 'the female of any bovine animal'. However, it also mentions that cow can also refer to 'a domestic bovine animal, regardless of sex or age'.

There are no entries in the Oxford English Corpus of cattle being used as a singular noun.

I would say that it is fine to refer to both the male and female as cows, and also that I can see no evidence that cattle can be used as a singular.

Answer 6

What ever happened to 'cain'. In my early dicationaries that was the correct singular non-gender specific of domestic cattle.

Answer 7

Oxford Living Dictionaries (aka Oxford Online Dictionary or ODO) offers as a definition for cow

1.1 (loosely) a domestic bovine animal, regardless of sex or age.

(Link)

But the same resource answers the vocabulary question What is the word for a cow that doesn't specify its sex?

The truth is that there is no noun in general use that refers equally to a cow or a bull.

Zoologists use two terms. The first is 'ox', which is often restricted to animals of the genus Bos (i.e. the wild cattle - gaur, banteng, yak, aurochs, and kouprey - as well as domestic cattle). In popular use, though, the word 'ox' often refers to a castrated male animal, so that isn't a perfect solution. The second zoological term is 'bovine', which is used as a noun to refer to any animal of the wider group that comprises cattle, buffaloes, and bison. But this would be a strange choice in most general contexts (emphases mine).

And the same source in a blog entry called The peculiar history of cows in the OED says:

...Very rarely [sic] do we stop and think about the fact that cows are not, technically speaking, a species. They’re only the female half...

...In the plural, we can say that they’re cattle (except when cattle is used to mean livestock generally). But the singular is messier. The word ox is one candidate, as it originally meant ‘a cow, a bull’, but now is more often specified to a ‘castrated adult male of this animal.’ Heifer is also sometimes used as a sex-neutral term, though this too is not strictly correct. Some may accuse such a position of pedantry, noting that the use of cow to refer to the species has grown so pervasive as to have changed its meaning, but that doesn’t mean the phrase ‘male cow’ is going to make scientific sense any time soon (emphases mine).

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When I am amongst my rural kin I have learned to call a cow a cow and a bull a bull and not to mix the two.