baaed

Sheep have been contributing vocabulary by shouting their own name for centuries. English baa is attested in the 1580s, although it may have existed earlier as the name of a child’s toy sheep—a tiny woolly creature with a very small but influential voice. The leading explanation is onomatopoeic: people heard the animal’s long, nasal cry and tried to reproduce it. Ancient writers noticed the same sound; Varro recorded Latin bee for a sheep’s call, while Latin balare meant “to bleat,” and Greek blēkhē referred to bleating. German bäh and mäh, and Catalan be meaning “sheep,” are similarly echo-like cousins rather than descendants of English baa. A competing source sometimes proposed is Arabic بَاء (bāʔ), but the sound-symbolic explanation is the stronger one—when a sheep says “baa,” languages everywhere seem tempted to quote it.