Meaning & use
sheep
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Meanings
nouncountable
A farm animal with a thick woolly coat, kept for its wool and meat and typically seen grazing in flocks.
Grammar: The plural is the same: one sheep, two sheep.
Patterns
- a flock of sheep
- shear sheep
The farmer moved the sheep to a new field.
A single sheep wandered onto the road.
Hundreds of sheep graze on the hills here.
nouncountabledisapprovingfigurative
A person who follows others without thinking for themselves.
Grammar: Often used as a plural insult: they act like sheep.
Patterns
- follow like sheep
He accused the crowd of behaving like sheep.
Don't be a sheep; form your own opinion.
Word forms
| plural | sheep |
|---|
Common combinations
- flock of sheep
- A flock of sheep blocked the lane.
- shear a sheep
- It takes a skilled worker to shear a sheep quickly.
- black sheep
- He was the black sheep of the family.
- herd sheep
- A dog helps herd sheep down the valley.
- sheep farm
- They run a large sheep farm in Wales.
Synonyms and how they differ
Word family
- sheepish adjective
- embarrassed, as if having done something silly
- sheepishly adverb
- in an embarrassed way
- sheepdog noun
- a dog trained to manage sheep
- sheepskin noun
- the skin of a sheep with the wool on
Commonly confused: sheep or sheepish?
sheep vs sheepish
Sheepish describes a feeling of embarrassment and is not about sheep as animals.
Practice
There were two hundred ______ on the hillside.
Choose one answer.
Sheep has the same form in singular and plural, so two hundred sheep is correct. Sheeps is not standard.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “sheep”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.