| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| buffalo |
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| SYLLABICATION: | buf·fa·lo |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  b f  -l  |
| NOUN: | Inflected forms: pl. buffalo or buf·fa·loes or buf·fa·los
1a. Any of several oxlike Old World mammals of the family Bovidae, such as the water buffalo and African buffalo. b. The North American bison, Bison bison. 2. The buffalo fish. | | TRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: buf·fa·loed, buf·fa·lo·ing, buf·fa·loes
1. To intimidate, as by a display of confidence or authority: “The board couldn't buffalo the federal courts as it had the Comptroller” (American Banker). 2. To deceive; hoodwink: “Too often . . . job seekers have buffaloed lenders as to their competency and training” (H. Jane Lehman). 3. To confuse; bewilder. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Italian bufalo or Portuguese or Spanish búfalo, from Late Latin b falus, from Latin bbalus, antelope, buffalo, from Greek boubalos, perhaps from bous, cow. See gwou- in Appendix I. | | WORD HISTORY: | The buffalo is so closely associated with the Wild West that one might assume that its name comes from a Native American word, as is the case with the words moose and skunk. In fact, however, buffalo can probably be traced back by way of one or more of the Romance languages through Late and Classical Latin and ultimately to the Greek word boubalos, meaning “an antelope or a buffalo.” The buffalo referred to by the Greek and Latin words was of course not the American one but an Old World mammal, such as the water buffalo of southern Asia. Applied to the North American mammal, buffalo is a misnomer, bison being the preferred term. As far as everyday usage is concerned, however, buffalo, first recorded for the American mammal in 1635, is older than bison, first recorded in 1774.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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