“Kine” is an archaic plural for cow, but unlike other plurals formed by adding -n rather than -s — children, brethren, oxen — it has no letters in common with its singular form.
Then again, cattle isn’t too similar, either:
Cattle did not originate as the term for bovine animals. It was borrowed from Old French catel, itself from Latin caput, head, and originally meant movable personal property, especially livestock of any kind, as opposed to real property (the land, which also included wild or small free-roaming animals such as chickens — they were sold as part of the land).
The word is closely related to “chattel” (a unit of personal property) and “capital” in the economic sense. The term replaced earlier Old English feoh “cattle, property” (cf. German: Vieh, Gothic: faihu).
The word cow came via Anglo-Saxon c? (plural c?), from Common Indo-European g??us (genitive g?owes) = “a bovine animal”, compare Persian Gâv, Sanskrit go, Welsh buwch.[citation needed] The genitive plural of “c?” is “c?na”, which gave the now archaic English plural, and Scots plural, of “kine”.
In older English sources such as the King James Version of the Bible, “cattle” refers to livestock, as opposed to “deer” which refers to wildlife. “Wild cattle” may refer to feral cattle or to undomesticated species of the genus Bos. Today, when used without any other qualifier, the modern meaning of “cattle” is usually restricted to domesticated bovines.
It just gets weirder when we realize there is no singular form of cattle:
Cattle can only be used in the plural and not in the singular: it is a plurale tantum. Thus one may refer to “three cattle” or “some cattle”, but not “one cattle”. There is no universally used singular form in modern English of “cattle”, other than the sex- and age-specific terms such as cow, bull, steer and heifer. Historically, “ox” was a non-gender-specific term for adult cattle, but generally this is now used only for draft cattle, especially adult castrated males.
“Cow” is in general use as a singular for the collective “cattle”, despite the objections by those who insist it to be a female-specific term. Although the phrase “that cow is a bull” is absurd from a lexicographic standpoint, the word “cow” is easy to use when a singular is needed and the sex is unknown or irrelevant — when “there is a cow in the road”, for example. Further, any herd of fully mature cattle in or near a pasture is statistically likely to consist mostly of cows, so the term is probably accurate even in the restrictive sense.
The French can use bête or bovin for a gender-nonspecific cow, although out here we know our taureaus from our boeufs.
Well, we Anglophones also have the option of beast or bovine, but either option sounds rather drôle.
I prefer the more dignified moo-cow, with gender specified, when necessary, via mommy-cow or daddy-cow. A steer is kind of a daddy-cow.
The book “Exaltation of Larks” is well worth owning in the “odd collective nouns” category. I had no idea there were so many.
“A (or ‘one’) head of cattle”
Personally, if there was “a cow in the road” then someone has to move the thing, which would be me. At that point, the information that it was actually a bull is not something I would consider “irrelevant”.