Oat /(ōt)/

Oat

n.

pl. Oats ((ōts))

  1. A well-known cereal grass (Avena sativa), and its edible grain, used as food and fodder; -- commonly used in the plural and in a collective sense. (Bot.)
  2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. [Obs.]

Phrases & Compounds
Animated oats
A grass (Avena sterilis) much like oats, but with a long spirally twisted awn which coils and uncoils with changes of moisture, and thus gives the grains an apparently automatic motion.
Oat fowl
the snow bunting; -- so called from its feeding on oats.
Oat grass
the name of several grasses more or less resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, Danthonia sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in parts of the United States.
To feel one's oats
to be conceited or self-important.
To sow one's wild oats
to indulge in youthful dissipation.
Wild oats
a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.