oaks
- 1Plural of oak.
Squirrels buried acorns beneath the oaks at the edge of the park.
Several of the oaks on the property were planted more than a century ago.
Note
Trees take the plural, wood does not: a grove of oaks, but a table made of oak. Kinds can be counted too, and not every oak counted is a true one, since she-oaks and the Lagunaria called white oak belong to other plant families entirely. The same spelling also names a race for young fillies.
- 2A stakes race that only three-year-old fillies may enter.
The trainer is pointing her best filly toward the Oaks in early summer.
Several of this year's Oaks contenders have never raced over that distance.
Note
Racing borrowed the name from the Epsom Oaks, and other stakes races restricted to three-year-old fillies now carry it too. It is capitalized like a proper name and, despite the final -s, treated as one race with a singular verb: the Oaks is run, a filly wins the Oaks. In front of another noun it works like an adjective, as in Oaks contenders.
oaks is a form of oak
oak, noun: Any tree of the genus Quercus, which bears acorns and has notably strong wood; the familiar kinds of England and northeastern North America shed their deeply lobed leaves each fall. Full entry
- Forms
- oakoaks plural
- Spelling
- oak → oaks: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with oaks, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origins
Formed from oak and the suffix -s.
From the Epsom Oaks, a horse race.