Word.ws English Dictionary

cattle prod

cattle prod noun: a stick designed to goad cows, steers, and similar animals in order to prompt them to move in a desired direction, now usually electrified to administer a stimulating shock to the animal.

Noun

cattle prod (plural cattle prods)

  1. A stick designed to goad cows, steers, and similar animals in order to prompt them to move in a desired direction, now usually electrified to administer a stimulating shock to the animal.
  2. (figuratively) Something used to goad or push someone to act.
    • Social media is only as virtuous as the people using it. With Donald J. Trump in office, using Twitter as a cattle prod to shock the country to attention multiple times a day — often over cultural topics like N.F.L. protests or “Roseanne” — there was a sense that every day on the site was a battle.2023 July 10, James Poniewozik, “The Twitter Watch Party Is Over”, in The New York Times

Verb

cattle prod (third-person singular simple present cattle prods, present participle cattle prodding, simple past and past participle cattle prodded)

  1. (figuratively, transitive) To goad or push someone to act.
    • (They cattle prodded people trying to get them to move, but to no avail.)
    • (The website locks streams at highest resolution to cattle prod users to pay higher bandwidth fees.)

Synonyms of cattle prod

Forms of cattle prod

Noun
pluralcattle prods
alternative formcattle-prod
alternative formcattleprod
Verb
third-person singular presentcattle prods
present participlecattle prodding
past participlecattle prodded
pastcattle prodded

Questions about cattle prod

What does cattle prod mean?
Cattle prod means a stick designed to goad cows, steers, and similar animals in order to prompt them to move in a desired direction, now usually electrified to administer a stimulating shock to the animal.
What part of speech is cattle prod?
Cattle prod can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of cattle prod?
The plural of cattle prod is cattle prods.

Words near cattle prod in the dictionary

  1. cattle pen
  2. cattle pens
  3. cattle plague
  4. cattle post
  5. cattle posts
  6. cattle prod
  7. cattle prodded
  8. cattle prodding
  9. cattle prods
  10. cattle ranch
  11. cattle ranches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cattle prod (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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Cite this entry: “cattle prod.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cattle_prod. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.