cows

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of cow.

   The cows grazed slowly across the hillside pasture.

   Dairy cows continue producing milk for months after calving.

   Note

   One plural covers every sense of the noun, and those senses pull in different directions. A farmer's cows are adult females, often ones that have calved, yet in casual talk a field of cows can include bulls and calves. Naturalists speak of elephant, whale and moose cows. In British and Irish speech the word is also a derogatory insult for women, so the plural depends on clear context.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of cow.

   A single stern look from the coach cows the younger players instantly.

   The manager's temper cows anyone who dares to disagree with him.

   Note

   This verb form only looks like the farmyard plural. It belongs to a separate word meaning to intimidate, unrelated to the plural of the animal. The verb is transitive, so it always needs someone on the receiving end: a look cows the players, a temper cows the staff. If no object follows, the word is probably the noun instead.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Alternative form of kouse.

   The women pried cows from the riverbank soil with digging sticks, filling their baskets with the knobby roots as the snow melted.

   Stores of ground cows carried the camp through the leaner winter months.

   Note

   Here the word names a root plant of the genus Lomatium, a staple of Native American food and medicine. It is a mass noun, so it takes no plural and usually no article: people dig cows or store ground cows, never a cow. That grammar is the quickest way to tell it from the cattle plural, which has exactly the same spelling.

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