beef [ME] We often find that after the Norman Conquest people used French words for an animal’s meat and the English word for the animal itself. Beef is from French, and *cow and ox [OE] are native English words, whereas *bull was adopted from Scandinavian, although the division is not as clear-cut as is sometimes claimed: beef has been used for the live animal from Middle English to this day, and the changeover for other meats was gradual. Beef, meaning ‘a complaint’ or ‘to complain’, was originally American, from the mid 19th century. The first person to write of the kind of beef possessed by a muscular man was American writer Herman Melville (1819–91), author of Moby-Dick. The British are so well known for eating beef that a French insult for an Englishman is un rosbif (‘a roast beef’). In English too, beefeater [E17th] was originally a term of contempt for a well-fed domestic servant. Now a Beefeater is a Yeoman Warder or Yeoman of the Guard at the Tower of London, a nickname first used in 1671. Beefburger has been recorded from 1940 in the USA.