Wether
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A castrated goat.
- 2 Archaic spelling of weather. alt-of, archaic
"There was a great fyer in the chamber, the wether was colde, and I saw now and then a Bishop come out;"
- 3 male sheep especially a castrated one wordnet
- 4 A castrated ram.
"I am a tainted Weather of the flocke, / Meeteſt for death, the weakeſt kinde of fruite"
- 1 To castrate a male sheep or goat. transitive
Example
More examples"The bull, the cow and the calf are covered with hair. The ram, or wether, the ewe and the lamb have wool. The billy goat, the gelded goat, the she-goat and kid have long hair and beards."
Etymology
From Middle English wether, wethir, wedyr, from Old English weþer (“a wether, ram”), from Proto-West Germanic *weþru, from Proto-Germanic *weþruz (“wether”), from Proto-Indo-European *wet- (“year”). Cognates Cognate with Scots weddir, woddir, wadder (“wether”), Dutch weder, weer (“wether”), German Widder (“wether, ram”), Norwegian Bokmål vær (“ram”), Norwegian Nynorsk vêr (“ram”), Swedish vädur (“wether, ram”), Icelandic veður (“wether, ram”), Latin vitulus (“calf”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.