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OneKitly

ox

nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɒks//
  • United States//ɑks//
  • Canada//ɒks//
  • Canada/[ɒks] ~ [ɑks]/
  • Australia//ɔks//

An adult castrated male of cattle (B. taurus), especially when used as a beast of burden.

noun

  1. 1

    An adult castrated male of cattle (B. taurus), especially when used as a beast of burden.

    a yoke of oxen

  2. 2

    Any bovine animal (genus Bos).

    Here the same four kinds are mentioned ... These are sheep, goats, camels and oxen.

Etymology

From Middle English oxe, from Old English oxa, from Proto-West Germanic *ohsō, from Proto-Germanic *uhsô (compare West Frisian okse, Dutch os, German Ochse), from Proto-Indo-European *uksḗn. Cognate with Welsh ych (“ox”), Tocharian A ops, Tocharian B okso (“draft-ox”), Avestan 𐬎𐬑𐬱𐬀𐬥 (uxšan, “bull”), Sanskrit उ॒क्षन् (ukṣán).

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of oxygenAbbreviation of oxygen.

    I'm super excited to be on the summit of K2! No Ox! (coughs) It was hard.

Etymology

Clipping of oxygen.

Forms

plural
oxen, oxes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).