WILD OATS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Wild oats

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/waɪld oʊts/ Listen

noun

Oat n. (pl. oats)

1.

(Bot.) 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.

2.

A musical pipe made of oat straw. (Obs.)

Animated oats or Animal oats (Bot.), 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 (Zool.), the snow bunting; so called from its feeding on oats. (Prov. Eng.)

Oat grass (Bot.), 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,

(a)

to be conceited or self-important. (Slang)

(b)

to feel lively and energetic.

To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation.

Wild oats (Bot.), a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.

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Etymology of 'Wild oats'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Wild oats" Quotes from Famous Books

... shaping the worldly history of their fellow-beings and leaving the non-worldly to take care of itself; soldiers illustrious in the army and navy; hale country gentlemen who took the lead in the country's hardy sports and pleasures; all sowing their wild oats early in life with hands that no power could stay; not always living to reap, but always leaving enough reaping to be done by the sad innocent who never sow; fathers of large families; and even when breaking the hearts of their wives, never losing ...

— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... foregathered with Mrs. Quickly and haply with Doll Tearsheet. All the whimsical miscellany of the Bohemians must have been known to him. We need not doubt that he had sowed wild oats. Doubtless, if he lived the same life now, he would be looked upon askance by good people who knew nothing of his temptations. But he was no neurotic; no genius of the first rank ever is or was. He never lost control of himself, and so did not, like some of his brilliant contemporaries, ...

— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... keep a clerk, Richard Swiveller was chosen to fill the place; and be it known to whom it may concern, that the said Richard was the merriest, laziest, weakest, most kind-hearted fellow who ever sowed a large crop of wild oats, and by a sudden stroke of good-luck found himself ...

— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... comparative failure; but that description of oats, called wild oats, promises well in the neighbourhood of Oxford. Turn-ups have had a favourable season at the ecarte tables of several dowagers in the West-end district. Beans are looking poorly—particularly the have-beens—whom we meet with seedy frocks and napless hats, gliding about late in the evenings. ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... are poor ignorant creatures, and, maybe, the blessings we long for will turn to a curse in the end. I doubt whether our little cottage will be the restful place it was before Uncle Mat came home. He has gone to a bad school to learn manners; and wild oats and tares and the husks that the swine did eat are poor crops, after all, Miss Ross,' finished ...

— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

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