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venison

/ˈvɛ.nɪ.sən/noun

venison is a noun meaning “The meat of a deer, especially one that was hunted in its own natural habitat” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled V-E-N-I-S-O-N and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 1 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of venison is venisons.

What does venison mean?

noun

  1. 1

    The meat of a deer, especially one that was hunted in its own natural habitat.

    After shooting a deer, field dressing is the next step necessary for high quality venison.

  2. 2

    The meat of an antelope.

  3. 3

    obsoleteThe meat of any wild animal that has been hunted rather than raised domestically.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce venison?

  • UK /ˈvɛ.nɪ.zən/
  • UK /ˈvɛ.nɪ.sən/
  • US /ˈvɛ.nɪ.sən/

Venison has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-venison.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of venison

  • venisons plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is venison?

Venison appears about once in every 1 million words in written English, the 33,236th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Venison in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense the meat of a deer:

LanguageWords
Frenchviande de biche, venaison, gibier
GermanRehfleisch, Wildbret, Wildfleisch
Portuguesecarne de cervo
Spanishcarne de venado, carne de ciervo

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does venison come from?

From Middle English venisoun, venesoun, from Anglo-Norman veneisun, venesoun, venesun (“meat of large game, particularly deer or boar; hunt”), from Latin vēnātiō, vēnātiōnem (“hunt; meat from a hunt”), formed on vēnātus, perfect participle of vēnor (“to hunt”). Doublet of venatio and venation.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).