Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Giving milk.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Giving milk; furnishing milk: as, a milch cow: now applied only to domestic animals, and chiefly to cows.
  • Milky: said of plants.
  • Yielding liquid; distilling drops (namely, tears).

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Giving milk; -- now applied only to beasts.
  • adjective obsolete Tender; pitiful; weeping.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective dated Giving milk
  • adjective obsolete Tender; pitiful; weeping.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective giving milk; bred or suitable primarily for milk production

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English milche, from Old English -milce (in thrīmilce, May, month when cows can be milked thrice a day); see melg- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English milche, melch, from Old English meolc, meolce ("giving milk, milch"), from Proto-Germanic *melkaz (“milky, milk-giving”), from Proto-Indo-European *mÁlg- (“to wipe, wipe off, milk”). Cognate with Low German melke ("milch"), German melk ("milk-giving, milch"), Icelandic milkur, mjólkur ("milk-giving"). More at milk.

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Examples

  • She will not be known as a milch cow long; she will be a low grade of corned beef, a couple of flank steaks and a few pairs of three-dollar shoes.

    Goat-Feathers Ellis Parker Butler 1903

  • We tried their traditional aelpi milch, which is milk with liquor.

    TravelPod.com TravelStream™ — Recent Entries at TravelPod.com 2010

  • The NNPC has had the reputation in the past as a kind of milch cow, with millions taken from its reserves due to alleged political interference, embezzlement and administrative incompetence.

    ANC Daily News Briefing 2008

  • Labour, however, has always had a down, publicly at any rate, on wealth and wealth creation, seeing wealth and the wealthy merely as a milch cow to enable money be transferred over to the non-productive element of society who are thus made Labour's clients and core vote.

    Archive 2009-07-12 2009

  • North Korea last week confirmed an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with its state-run news agency saying that "more than 10,000 heads of draught oxen, milch cows and pigs have so far been infected with the diseases and thousands of them died."

    Starving N. Korea begs for food, but U.S. has concerns about resuming aid 2011

  • America — ­at this last she smiled affectionately with memory of the great controversy he had waged for the beef cow and the milch cow as against the dual purpose cow.

    CHAPTER XXVIII 2010

  • Most people didn't recognize the quote, but Simpson was probably attempting to channel H.L. Mencken's line about government itself, which Mencken called "a milch-cow with 125 million teats" (the population of the United States at the time).

    Richard (RJ) Eskow: Annoying Alan Simpson: The 310,000,001st Reason to Vote RJ 2010

  • Labour, however, has always had a down, publicly at any rate, on wealth and wealth creation, seeing wealth and the wealthy merely as a milch cow to enable money be transferred over to the non-productive element of society who are thus made Labour's clients and core vote.

    Clive Betts: Sleazocrat & Porkocrat 2009

  • He stole from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the University of California by appropriating Professor Nirdenhammer, the wizard of farm management.

    CHAPTER VI 2010

  • North Korea last week confirmed an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, with its state-run news agency saying that "more than 10,000 heads of draught oxen, milch cows and pigs have so far been infected with the diseases and thousands of them died."

    Starving N. Korea begs for food, but U.S. has concerns about resuming aid 2011

Comments

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  • from the indo-european root melg- see galenious

    July 25, 2010

  • What an interesting etymology!

    January 3, 2013