bull [OE] Bull goes back to Old Norse boli. In Stock Exchange terminology a bull [E18th] is a person who buys shares hoping to sell them at a higher price later, the opposite of a *bear. The latter term came first, and it seems likely that bull was invented as a related animal analogy. Nowadays, people might associate bull in the sense ‘nonsense’ with the rather cruder term bullshit, which has been used with the same meaning since the early 20th century. Bull is much older being first recorded in the early 17th century, in the sense ‘an expression containing a contradiction in terms or a ludicrous inconsistency’. An Irish bull was a fuller name for this. This would seem to go back to Old French boul ‘fraud, deceit’, which appears in Middle English as boule. A papal bull [ME], an order or announcement by the pope, is from medieval Latin bulla, ‘a sealed document’. The bull of bulrush [LME] and bullfrog [M18th] probably indicates size and vigour from the animal. See also bulletin.