bull

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A large adult male of the cattle family

   The farmer kept the bull in a separate field.

2. 2
   noun

   Nonsense; foolish or untrue talk

   Everything he said about the deal was just bull.

3. 3
   noun

   An official document or order issued by the Pope

   The papal bull condemned the military action.

Appears in

Simplified etymology

The animal word bull, recorded from Old English, goes back to Old Norse boli. The early-18th-century stock-market sense, for someone who buys shares hoping to sell them at a higher price, was probably created as an animal counterpart to the earlier term bear. Bull meaning “nonsense” is a different word, first recorded in the early 17th century and probably derived from Old French boul, “fraud, deceit.” Papal bull comes from medieval Latin bulla, “a sealed document.”

From Middle English bole, bul, bule, from a conflation of Old English bula (“bull, steer”) and Old Norse boli, both from Proto-Germanic *bulô (“bull”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰl̥no-, from *bʰel- (“to blow, swell up”). Cognate with West Frisian bolle, Dutch bul, German Low German Bull, German Bulle, Swedish bulla; also Old Irish ball (“limb”), Latin follis (“bellows, leather bag”), Albanian bolle (“testicles”), Ancient Greek φαλλός (phallós, “penis”). Of sense 11, (a man or boy), derived from the Philadelphia English pronunciation of boy, which is practically a homophone of bull.

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External links

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• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary