Webster
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Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary · 1913

Oat

Oat (ōt), n.; pl. Oats (ōts). [OE. ote, ate, AS. āta, akin to Fries. oat. Of uncertain origin.] 1. (Bot.) A well-known cereal grass (Avena sativa), and its edible grain; — commonly used in the plural and in a collective sense.

2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. [Obs.] Milton.

Animated oats or Animal oats (Bot.), A grass (Avena sterilis) much like oats, but with a long spirally twisted awn which coils and uncoils with changes of moisture, and thus gives the grains an apparently automatic motion. — Oat fowl (Zoöl.), the snow bunting; — so called from its feeding on oats. [Prov. Eng.] — Oat grass (Bot.), the name of several grasses more or less resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, D. sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in parts of the United States. — To feel one's oats, to be conceited ro self-important. [Slang] — To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation. Thackeray. — Wild oats (Bot.), a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Noah Porter, editor (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913). Public domain. Text as transcribed by MICRA, Inc., from Project Gutenberg. Changed for Deep Dive Bible: Greek, which our source spelled in Latin letters, set in Greek letters; entries of one spelling merged into one article; Greek words our source left out (shown as “?”), read from the 1898 printing, from the same plates (the Library of Congress’s copy), where the place could be found with certainty.