kine
- 1Plural of cow: cows or cattle, a form now heard only in old-fashioned writing or rural dialect.
Pippin could see all the Pelennor laid out before him, dotted into the distance with farmsteads and little walls, barns and byres, but nowhere could he see any kine or other beasts.
1955, J[ohn] R[onald] R[euel] Tolkien, “Minas Tirith”Note
A plural built twice over: Middle English ky was already plural, and the -en ending was added on top of it. Kine belongs to archaic and dialect speech, and writers use it to give a scene an old, rural feel. Tolkien still uses it in 1955 for the empty farmland of the Pelennor.
Checked 2 Nov 2026 · 4 facts
- Middle English ky was already a plural of cow. en.wiktionary.org
- Kine is a double plural formed by adding the plural ending -en to ky. en.wiktionary.org
- Tolkien uses kine when describing the Pelennor farmland with no livestock visible. en.wiktionary.org
- The Return of the King, containing this passage, was first published in 1955. sothebys.com
- 2Short for kinescope: a film recording of a television broadcast, made by filming the picture on a monitor.
Archivists discovered a rare kine of the 1952 broadcast in cold storage.
Before videotape, networks relied on a kine to rebroadcast programs in other time zones.
Note
Broadcasting shorthand that clips kinescope in its recording meaning: a film made by pointing a camera at a monitor's screen. The full word can also name an early receiver tube, now a historical sense, and it works as a verb (to kinescope a broadcast). The short form kine is a noun for the film itself, the telerecording, though it has also named the tube.
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Origin
The word is a double plural. Its source, Middle English kyn or kyne, was ky with the plural ending -en added on, and English inherited it from there.