A narrow bed, especially one made of canvas on a collapsible frame.
Chiefly British A crib.
[Hindi khāṭ, from Sanskrit khaṭvā, from Tamil kaṭṭu, to bind, tie.]
Word History: People might assume that there is nothing particularly exotic about the history of the word cot. However, cot is a good example of how some words borrowed from other cultures become so firmly naturalized over time that they lose their émigré flavor. The British first encountered the object denoted by cot, a light frame strung with tapes or rope, in India, where their trading stations had been established as early as 1612. The word cot, first recorded in English in 1634, comes from khāṭ, the Hindi name for the contrivance. During subsequent years, cot has been used to denote other types of beds, including in British usage a crib.
cot 2 (kŏt) n.
A small house.
A protective covering or sheath.
[Middle English, from Old English.]
cot 3 abbr. cotangent
co·tan·gent (kō-tān'jənt)
(click for larger image in new window) n.
Abbr. cot
The reciprocal of the tangent of an angle in a right triangle.
The tangent of the complement of a directed angle or arc.
The ratio of the length of the adjacent side of an acute angle in a right triangle to the length of the opposite side. The cotangent is the inverse of the tangent.
The ratio of the ordinate to the abscissa of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system, the arc being of length x and measured counterclockwise from the point (1, 0) if x is positive or clockwise if x is negative.
A function of a number x, equal to the cotangent of an angle whose measure in radians is equal to x.