Word.ws English Dictionary

bum calf

bum calf noun: a young heifer or bull which has been orphaned or abandoned; it must be adopted by another cow, steal milk, or be bottle-fed in order to survive, and is therefore often a runt.

Noun

bum calf (plural bum calves)

  1. A young heifer or bull which has been orphaned or abandoned; it must be adopted by another cow, steal milk, or be bottle-fed in order to survive, and is therefore often a runt.
    • At the start of calving season, there was another bum calf, Ferdinand, whose mother had abandoned him.2005, Lynn Parr, Cowgirl: A Home on the Wyoming Range, page 149
    • I could do it all — I could play their game until I dropped — but I would never own a square foot of land, a bushel of oats or a bum calf in my own name.2002, Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean, page 291
    Synonyms:
    bummer, dogie, leppy

Examples of bum calf in a sentence

  • She usually manages to be busy feeding some bum calf or wrangling the horses or something.1992, Teresa Jordan, Cowgirls: Women of the American West, page 83:
  • "I feel like a bum calf when you do this to me," Madeleine said and when her mother said, "What?" Madeleine said, "Never mind."1989, Gretel Ehrlich, Heart Mountain, page 114:

Synonyms of bum calf

Forms of bum calf

pluralbum calves

Questions about bum calf

What does bum calf mean?
Bum calf means a young heifer or bull which has been orphaned or abandoned; it must be adopted by another cow, steal milk, or be bottle-fed in order to survive, and is therefore often a runt.
How do you use bum calf in a sentence?
She usually manages to be busy feeding some bum calf or wrangling the horses or something.
What part of speech is bum calf?
Bum calf is a noun.
What is the plural of bum calf?
The plural of bum calf is bum calves.

Words near bum calf in the dictionary

  1. bum boy
  2. bum boys
  3. bum bum
  4. bum burp
  5. bum burps
  6. bum calf
  7. bum calves
  8. bum cheeks
  9. bum chin
  10. bum chins
  11. bum chum

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bum calf (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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