vet

/vɛt/

vet noun: a veterinarian or veterinary surgeon.

Noun (1)

vet (plural vets)

(colloquial) A veterinarian or veterinary surgeon.
- Colin Cameron, a vet who examined the dead animal, said there was "no doubt the kitten would have suffered unnecessarily" before dying.2011 December 14, Steven Morris, “Devon woman jailed for 168 days for killing kitten in microwave”, in Guardian

Noun (2)

vet (plural vets)

(US, colloquial) A veteran (a former soldier or other member of armed forces).
- “A former soldier, sir. A vet. Theyʼre all vets, a little shellshocked.”1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Penguin Books (2014), page 73

Verb

vet (third-person singular simple present vets, present participle vetting, simple past and past participle vetted)

To thoroughly check or investigate particularly with regard to providing formal approval.
- The FBI vets all nominees to the Federal bench.
- Sir Humphrey Appleby: Nevertheless we do not admit it (the existence of MI6). Not everyone round this table has been vetted (pun). / Jim Hacker: I thought that's something you do to cats (laugh track). / Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes indeed, but not ferrets, Minister (laugh track).1980 March 10, Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn, “The Economy Drive”, in Yes, Minister, season 1, episode 3, spoken by Jim Hacker and Humphrey Appleby (Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne)
Synonyms:

evaluate

Noun (3) capitalized: VET

VET (countable and uncountable, plural VETs)

(abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of vocational education and training.
(abbreviation, countable, initialism) Initialism of video editing terminal.

vet meaning in Urdu and Malayalam

vet in Urdu

check or investigate particularly: جانچنا ۔ پرکھنا Janchna-Parakhna

vet in Malayalam

പശുവൈദ്യൻ

Examples of vet in a sentence

We knew that the candidates selected had already been carefully vetted by higher Chinese officials, and that our ‘voting’ was mere lip-service to Chinese claims of democracy, but we did it anyway.2000 September, “Corrupt and Farcical Elections”, in Racial Discrimination in Tibet, Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, →OCLC...
House and Senate Committees are made up of elected legislators who vet the bill and hear from stakeholders and members of the public.2023, “How a Bill Becomes a Law”, in mnnurses.org:

All 40 example sentences with vet

Synonyms of vet

evaluate

Forms of vet

Noun
plural	vets
plural	VETs
Verb
third-person singular present	vets
present participle	vetting
past participle	vetted
past	vetted

Past tense of vet: vetted

Origin of vet

Clipping of veterinarian.

Clipping of veteran.

Possibly by analogy from Etymology 1, in the sense of "verifying the soundness [of an animal]"

Words formed from vet

Words that rhyme with vet

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about vet

What does vet mean?: Vet means a veterinarian or veterinary surgeon.
What is vet in Urdu?: Vet in Urdu is جانچنا ۔ پرکھنا (Janchna-Parakhna). See Vet meaning in Urdu.
How do you use vet in a sentence?: We knew that the candidates selected had already been carefully vetted by higher Chinese officials, and that our ‘voting’ was mere lip-service to Chinese claims of democracy, but we did it anyway.
What part of speech is vet?: Vet can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce vet?: Vet is pronounced /vɛt/.
What is the plural of vet?: The plural of vet is vets.

Words near vet in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: vet (page history and authors); VET (page history and authors); vet (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-vet.wav.

Cite this entry: “vet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/vet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.