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These individually wrapped peanut butter and oat bites are a suitable lunch box treat, or fuel for people who take long bike rides and other torturous endurance sports.—Alex Beggs, Bon Appetit Magazine, 7 Feb. 2026 The financial engineer learned how to run a tractor, to plow fields and plant oats, to paint barns and work with horses.—Aldo Svaldi, Denver Post, 1 Feb. 2026 The menu has a lot of delicious choices, but the one that intrigues my girlfriend is their overnight oat bowl.—C.w. Cameron, AJC.com, 1 Feb. 2026 Camilla, too, loves oats, as told by her son Tom Parker Bowles in his book Cooking and the Crown.—Rachel Burchfield, InStyle, 30 Jan. 2026 See All Example Sentences for oat
Word History
Etymology
Middle English ote "the grain of the oat plant, the plant itself," going back to Old English āte (weak feminine noun), of uncertain origin
Note:
Old English āte has been compared with regional Dutch aate, oote "wild oats" (West and Zeeland Flanders), West Frisian and Groningen Dutch oat. (These contrast with Dutch haver, denoting cultivated oats, a reflex of the Common Germanic word for the grain.) Michiel de Vaan, in an addenda to the online etymologiebank.nl, believes that the Flanders words are semantic extensions of regional aat "food," of general Germanic origin (see eat entry 2), though this hypothesis would scarcely explain the Old English word. Jan de Vries (Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, Brill, 1971) hypothesizes that the Low Country words may have been borrowed from English.
First Known Use
before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a
Time Traveler
The first known use of oat was
before the 12th century