Word.ws English Dictionary

wild oat

wild oat is the singular of wild oats.

Meaning of wild oats

Noun

wild oats pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Oats of non-cultivated species of Avena, a genus of grasses.
  2. (plural, plural-only) Chasmanthium latifolium, a grass, Indian woodoats
  3. (plural, plural-only) Species of Uvularia, the bellworts.
  4. (plural, plural-only) Species of Aegilops, goatgrass.
  5. (dated, euphemistic, plural, plural-only, slang) Sexual intercourse outside of marriage.
    • Youths would better look at the specimens of disease taken by the surgeon from innocent wives, and see how they tally with the “wild oats” of some husband’s youth before they begin sowing their own. ¶ There are thousands of syphilitics and tens of thousands of gonorrheics in every large city in the...1912, G. Frank Lydston, The lie of the wild oats, page 3
  6. (archaic, plural, plural-only) A rake.

Questions about wild oat

What is wild oat the singular of?
Wild oat is the singular of wild oats.

Words near wild oat in the dictionary

  1. wild marjoram
  2. wild marjorams
  3. wild men
  4. wild mint
  5. wild mustard
  6. wild oat
  7. wild oats
  8. wild olive
  9. wild olives
  10. wild onion
  11. wild onion dinner

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wild oat (page history and authors); wild oats (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: “wild oat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wild_oat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.