bull
/bʊl/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.34 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "The quick eyes of a female caught sight of him first. With a barking guttural she called the attention of the others. Several huge bulls stood erect to get a better view of the intruder. With bared fangs and bristling necks they advanced slowly toward him, with deep-throated, ominous growls."
- "The upshot of the affair was that she accompanied me next morning. I rowed into the adjoining cove and up to the edge of the beach. There were seals all about us in the water, and the bellowing thousands on the beach compelled us to shout at each other to make ourselves heard. "I know men club them," I said, trying to reassure myself and gazing doubtfully at a large bull, not thirty feet away, upreared on his fore-flippers and regarding me intently. "But the question is, How do they club them?""
- "Meanwhile the Tommies had discovered several large tins of ham in the captured lorry. 'That,' said the big Nazi, 'is for our tea.' 'No,' said a Tommy sergeant-major. 'That's for our tea. For you, chummy, we've kept a nice bit of bull.'"
- "This accompt has been made to appear a bull accompt, i.e. that the bulls cannot take their stock. The fact is the reverse; it is a bear accompt, but the bears, unable to deliver their stock, have conjointly banged the market, and pocketed the tickets, to defeat the rise and loss that would have ensued to them by their buying on a rising price on the accompt day […]"
- "Bulls are hoping the prosecutions draw a line under the sector's troubled past and will allow it to tap billions of dollars of cash from Wall Street."
- "You never waited until the train stopped to get off. The railroad bulls were waiting at the stops searching for freeloaders."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰel- Proto-Germanic *bulô Old English bula ▲ Proto-Germanic *bulô Old Norse bolibor. Middle English bole English bull From Middle English bole, bul, bule, from a conflation of Old English bula (“bull, steer”) and Old Norse boli, both from Proto-Germanic *bulô (“bull”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰl̥no-, from *bʰel- (“to blow, swell up”). Cognate with West Frisian bolle, Dutch bul, German Low German Bull, German Bulle, Swedish bulla; also Old Irish ball (“limb”), Latin follis (“bellows, leather bag”), Albanian bolle (“testicles”), Ancient Greek φαλλός (phallós, “penis”). Of sense 11, (a man or boy), derived from the Philadelphia English pronunciation of boy, which is practically a homophone of bull.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Usage
- Countable
- Uncountable
- Slang
- American usage
- British usage
- Obsolete
- Informal
- Intransitive verb
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Law, People.