Christmas Animals: Al About Deer

Traditional Christmas cards usually depict Santa Claus and his group of reindeer. Santa Claus's reindeer are a team of flying reindeer traditionally held to pull the sleigh of Santa Claus and help him deliver Christmas gifts.
A deer is any of various hoofed ruminant mammals of the family Cervidae, characteristically having deciduous antlers borne chiefly by the males. The deer family also includes the elk, moose, caribou, and reindeer.

Word History

In various Middle English texts one finds a fish, an ant, or a fox called a der, the Middle English ancestor of our word deer. In its Old English form dor, our word referred to any animal, including members of the deer family, and continued to do so in Middle English, although it also acquired the specific sense "a deer." By the end of the Middle English period, around 1500, the general sense had all but disappeared. Deer is a commonly cited example of a semantic process called specialization, by which the range of a word's meaning is narrowed or restricted. When Shakespeare uses the expression "mice and rats, and such small deer" for Edgar's diet in King Lear, probably written in 1605, we are not sure whether deer has the general or the specific sense. It is interesting to note that the German word Tier, the cognate of English deer, still has the general sense of "animal."

Types of deer & deer-related words:

antler - deciduous horn of a member of the deer family
scut - a short erect tail
flag - a conspicuously marked or shaped tail
ruminant - any of various cud-chewing hoofed mammals having a stomach divided into four (occasionally three) compartments
Cervidae, family Cervidae - deer: reindeer; moose or elks; muntjacs; roe deer
pricket - male deer in his second year
buck - a male deer

doe - a female deer

fawn - a young deer
red deer - common deer of temperate Europe and Asia
American elk - large North American deer with large much-branched antlers in the male
Cervus nipon, Japanese deer, sika - small deer of Japan with slightly forked antlers
Virginia deer, white-tailed deer - common North American deer; its tail has a white underside
elk / moose - large northern deer with enormous flattened antlers in the male; called `elk' in Europe and `moose' in North America
fallow deer - small Eurasian deer
roe deer - small graceful deer of Eurasian woodlands having small forked antlers
caribou, reindeer - Arctic deer with large antlers in both sexes; called `reindeer' in Eurasia and `caribou' in North America