What is "avena sativa"

Oat \Oat\ ([=o]t), n.; pl. Oats ([=o]ts). [OE. ote, ate, AS.

1. (Bot.) A well-known cereal grass ( Avena sativa), and its edible grain, used as food and fodder; -- commonly used in the plural and in a collective sense.

2. A musical pipe made of oat straw. [Obs.] --Milton. Animated oats or Animal oats (Bot.), A grass ( Avena sterilis) much like oats, but with a long spirally twisted awn which coils and uncoils with changes of moisture, and thus gives the grains an apparently automatic motion. Oat fowl (Zo["o]l.), the snow bunting; -- so called from its feeding on oats. [Prov. Eng.] Oat grass (Bot.), the name of several grasses more or less resembling oats, as Danthonia spicata, Danthonia sericea, and Arrhenatherum avenaceum, all common in parts of the United States. To feel one's oats,

   1. to be conceited or self-important. [Slang]

   2. to feel lively and energetic.

      To sow one's wild oats, to indulge in youthful dissipation.
      --Thackeray.

      Wild oats (Bot.), a grass ( Avena fatua) much resembling oats, and by some persons supposed to be the original of cultivated oats.

Avena \A*ve"na\, n. [L.] (Bot.) A genus of grasses, including the common oat ( Avena sativa); the oat grasses.