(dîr)
noun pl. deer deer Any of various hoofed ruminant mammals of the family Cervidae, characteristically having deciduous antlers borne chiefly by the males. The deer family also includes the elk, moose, caribou, and reindeer.
Word History: In various Middle English texts one finds a fish, an ant, or a fox called a
der, the Middle English ancestor of our word
deer. In its Old English form
dēor, our word referred to any animal, including members of the deer family, and continued to do so in Middle English, although it also acquired the specific sense “a deer.” By the end of the Middle English period, around 1500, the general sense had all but disappeared.
Deer is a commonly cited example of a semantic process called specialization, by which the range of a word's meaning is narrowed or restricted. When Shakespeare uses the expression “mice and rats, and such small deer” for Edgar's diet in
King Lear, probably written in 1605, we are not sure whether
deer has the general or the specific sense. It is interesting to note that the German word
Tier, the cognate of English
deer, still has the general sense of “animal.”
