We can count cows and pigs. We can certainly count sheep. But we don’t eat a beef, we eat some beef, and we would never say “three porks.” Yet if you open old volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find a strange historical artifact: the official plural of beef was once beeves and the plural of fish was once fishes! Why did we stop counting our meat? Why does English have two completely different words for a creature and its flesh, while swimming creatures like fish collapsed into a single, confusing zero-plural noun from stream to skillet? The answers are muddled and the dots aren’t easy to connect but we can find them in a medieval invasion and a little kitchen math. And, we can especially understand them through the lens of those who slaughtered the animal versus those who ate it.
The Norman Conquest: Barnyard Saxon vs. Dining-Room French
This split between living animals and the meat we consume is one of the most famous quirks of the English language. Amazingly, it can be traced directly back to the Norman Conquest of 1066. When William the Conqueror seized the English throne, French-speaking Normans became the ruling aristocracy, while the native Anglo-Saxon population remained the agricultural lower class. For nearly three centuries, a stark social division dictated daily vocabulary:
- The Anglo-Saxon peasants worked the pastures, shoveled manure, and tended living livestock. As a result, living animals retained their Germanic roots (cū, swīn, scēap, cealf).
- The Norman-French nobility rarely set foot in a barn. They encountered the animals only when cooked, seasoned, and served at banquets. Consequently, the prepared meats adopted French terms (bœuf, porc, mouton, veau).
Because French culinary terms entered English strictly as names for undifferentiated cooked food, they were integrated as uncountable mass nouns, putting them in the same grammatical category as water, wood, or flour. You could count the living pigs in the pen, but you could only eat a portion of pork on a plate.
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When a Cow Was “A Beef” (And Why We Said Beeves)
So where did beeves come from? Before the word beef settled permanently into a mass noun for sliced steak and ground chuck, early Middle English briefly treated the borrowed French word boef as a count noun for the animal itself.
In late medieval and early agricultural Britain, a living cow or ox fattened up specifically for slaughter was called a beef. If a drover took a herd of ten market-ready cattle to town, he was herding ten beeves.
As the English language modernized, the Germanic terms (cows, cattle, oxen) once again became the preferred terms for such animals, while beef retreated exclusively to the kitchen and the butcher’s shop. As beef became an undifferentiated mass of protein, the plural beeves was rendered obsolete, surviving only in historic farm records and archaic legal codes.
Why “Fish” Became a Mass Noun
If cattle and swine underwent a severe linguistic split, from cows to beef and pigs to pork, how did sea creatures escape it entirely?
In Old English, a living sea creature wasn’t a zero-plural noun at all. A single swimming creature was a fisc, and more than one were fiscas (which naturally evolved into Middle English fishes). Furthermore, unlike livestock, English never adopted a French word for fish on the plate. We never ordered or ate poisson. The Anglo-Saxon root remained the universal label for the fish swimming in the sea and the filet cooking in the pan.
So why did fishes gradually collapse into the singular, zero-plural fish for both the living animal and the food? This collapse happened because of two distinct forces:
The “Game & Quarry” Zero-Plural
To a modern reader who goes to the lake with a single rod and reel hoping to catch one or two bass, or a hunter sitting in a tree stand waiting for a single buck, the idea of game animals being an “uncountable collective” might seem counterintuitive.
In medieval and early modern England, however, hunting and fishing weren’t individual weekend hobbies, they were large-scale estate management and collective food harvests.
Noble hunts involved teams of dogs, beaters, and horsemen driving herds across royal forests, while coastal communities and inland fisheries relied on large weirs and drag-nets. Hunters and fishermen didn’t count their quarry as distinct individuals one by one. They measured the overall yield of the hunting expedition.
Because wild quarry was treated as a harvested commodity rather than counted livestock, English developed a distinct grammatical habit: quarry nouns drifted into zero-plurals (where the singular and plural forms are identical):
- “We stalked deer” (treating the wild population in the forest as an aggregate resource, rather than counting deers).
- “We shot wild duck” or “flushed quail” (referring to the flight or bag of game as a singular entity).
- “We brought in a catch of fish” or “netted herring” (treating the haul from the weir or boat as a collective bounty).
Over centuries, as wild food gathering became increasingly commercialized and regulated, the habit of referring to the quarry in the wild (catching fish) merged seamlessly with the language of the dinner table (eating fish), helping permanently squeeze the plural fishes out of everyday speech.
The Culinary Shift: Whole Commodity to Mass Noun
When a cow was butchered, it was dismantled into roasts, briskets, and ribs, a complete transformation that required a abstract mass noun. A small trout or herring, by contrast, went straight from the water into the skillet essentially intact. Because the culinary product was identical in name to the living animal, the mass-noun status of food (“We are eating fish tonight”) gradually swallowed the living plural. Today, the plural fishes has retreated almost entirely from everyday speech, surviving primarily in:
- Marine Biology: Used strictly to designate multiple distinct species of fish (e.g., “The Amazon basin contains hundreds of different fishes”).
- Idioms & Folklore: Preserved in fossilized phrases like “sleeping with the fishes” or biblical translations (the loaves and the fishes).
Why Chickens and Turkeys Resisted
Why do we count chickens and turkeys, but never say poultries or porks? The answer comes down to portion scale and culinary taxonomy:
- Poultry followed the exact French mass-noun path as beef and pork (derived from Old French pouletrie). It entered the language as a mass-noun and remained an abstract category for dressed fowl flesh, which is why we never say “three poultries.”
- Chicken and Turkey, however, straddle both categories. Unlike an 800-pound steer, a single bird can be prepared, roasted, and served as a complete, countable dining unit (“We roasted two whole chickens”).
Because the domestic yard bird was raised in small batches and frequently served whole, its countable Germanic identity remained intact alongside its use as a mass noun when broken up into distinct portions (“I ordered chicken for dinner”).
The Curious Case of Sheep
You might notice in the table above that sheep sits in a strange category of its own. It never adopted a separate plural (“sheeps”), nor did it follow the path of cows and pigs.
That is because in Proto-Germanic and Old English, scēap was already a neuter zero-plural noun, meaning one sheep was scēap, and ten sheep were scēap. When the Normans introduced mutton (mouton) for the prepared meat of the adult animal on the table, the living animal retained its ancient, unchanged Germanic plural.
But English is never done with strange quirks. We never refer to the meat on our plate as “sheep.” It’s strictly mutton or lamb. While adult sheep took the French culinary name of mutton, lamb resisted the Norman split entirely. The Anglo-Saxon word lamb remained the universal term for both the young, living animal in the pasture and the actual food derived from it (we never adopted the French agneau). Much like whole roasted chickens, young lambs were small enough, common enough, and recognizable enough to bridge the gap between the barnyard and the dining room. But I didn’t bring up “counting sheep” at the beginning to be clever. There is a connection between all this and our modern “Eenie, Meenie, Miny, Moe” and the act of counting sheep to relax and fall asleep.
The Celtic Score: Yan Tan Tethera
Long after the Anglo-Saxons pushed the native Celtic-speaking Britons to the fringes (Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, Scotland), Northern English shepherds in places like Yorkshire, Cumbria, and the Lake District kept using ancient Brythonic (Celtic) numeral systems to tally their flocks.
Because English numbers were clunky and varied by dialect, shepherds used a rhythmic, 20-base counting system (“a score”) that sounded like this:
The shepherd would count to 20 (Giggot), make a physical notch on a tally stick or move a pebble to their other pocket, and start over at Yan.
From the Meadow to the Playground: Eenie, Meenie, Miny, Moe
As industrialization gradually eroded sheep-farming traditions, children who grew up hearing their parents and grandparents count sheep through these rhythmic, rhyming scores turned them into nursery rhymes and choosing games. Variants recorded across northern England and Scotland included:
- “Eena, meena, mona, mite…”
- “Yan, tan, tethera, methera…”
- “Ina, mina, teena, tethera…”
Over the 18th and 19th centuries, the phonetic cadence of counting sheep evolved directly into the playground elimination games we know today.
The Jump to “Counting Sheep” for Sleep
How did this turn into a mental sleep aid?
- The Rhythmic, Monotonous Chant: Shepherds didn’t count slowly in their heads; they chanted the Yan Tan Tethera sequence in a rapid, repetitive, sing-song cadence as hundreds of sheep moved through a narrow gate one by one. It was hypnotic, rhythmic, and required passive, barely paying attention type focus. A shepherd could well go into a counting trance after a while. It was probably quite meditative.
- The Fable Tradition (The 12th–16th Century Parables): The trope of counting sheep as a cure for restlessness actually appears in medieval Spanish and Italian folktales (such as Disciplina Clericalis and early European collections, later referenced in Don Quixote). In these tales, a storyteller putting a restless king or lord to sleep tells a story about a farmer who must ferry hundreds of sheep across a river two at a time, requiring the listener to wait while every single sheep is counted across until the listener falls asleep from sheer boredom.
- The 19th-Century Scientific Adoption: By the Victorian era, when pediatricians and psychologists began writing about insomnia and childhood sleep routines, the rural cultural memory of the shepherd counting sheep through the gate merged with visualization psychology; visualizing a continuous, endless stream of sheep hopping over a stile or gate.
So, now you know why we no longer say beeves and fishes, why we don’t count sheeps, and why we DO count sheep!
Further Reading
- The True History of Salisbury Steak: From Medical Panacea to Comfort Food Swap
- Is Your Dinner Redundant? Why ‘Repetitive’ Food Names Like Chai Tea are Correct”