OAT

Oat (ōt), n.; pl. Oats (ōts). [[OE. ote, ate, AS. āta, akin to Fries. oat. Of uncertain origin.]] 1. 1. (Bot.) A well-known cereal grass (Avena sativa), and its edible grain; — commonly used in the plural and in a collective sense.
2. 2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. Milton.
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 (Zoöl.), the snow bunting; — so called from its feeding on oats. — Oat grass (Bot.), the name of several grasses more or less resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, D. sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in parts of the United States. — To feel one's oats, to be conceited ro self-important. — To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation. Thackeray. — Wild oats (Bot.), a grass (Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.