Word.ws English Dictionary

wild oats

wild oats noun: oats of non-cultivated species of Avena, a genus of grasses.

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
    • You had a harem instinct when you were young. You sowed your wild oats. So did you, Mater.1916, Joseph Noel, “Wild Oats”, in Three plays and a curtain raiser, page 138
  6. (archaic, plural, plural-only) A rake.

Examples of wild oats in a sentence

  • Add to these the other wild oats products, crime, pauperism, prostitution, inebriety and insanity1912, G. Frank Lydston, The lie of the wild oats, page 3:
  • To allay our fears, we cracked the occasional joke about free love and began half-seriously calling it the Wild Oats Project.2015, Robin Rinaldi, The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at any Cost, page 49:

Forms of wild oats

alternative formwild oat

Words formed from wild oats

Questions about wild oats

What does wild oats mean?
Wild oats means oats of non-cultivated species of Avena, a genus of grasses.
How do you use wild oats in a sentence?
Add to these the other wild oats products, crime, pauperism, prostitution, inebriety and insanity
What part of speech is wild oats?
Wild oats is a noun.

Words near wild oats in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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 oats.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wild_oats. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.