A hybrid bovine animal, bred from a yak bull and a common cow, used for domestic purposes in Northern India. Also called zobo, zobu [with masculine suffix ‑bo] .
1841
Oxen of the common kind are not used for ploughing, the zho ox, or hybrid male between the yak..and the common cow, or the humped variety called zebu, being greatly preferred, as is its sister, the zhomo, for the dairy. Ploughing is performed by a pair of zhos.
H. H. Wilson, Trav. Moorcroft & Trebeckvol. I. 272
1841
The Zho or Yak-mule.
H. H. Wilson, Trav. Moorcroft & Trebeckvol. I. 309
1854
The zobo..is but rarely seen in these mountains, though common in the North West Himalaya.
J. D. Hooker, Himalayan Journalsvol. I. ix. 213
1867
A. L. Adams, Wanderings of Naturalist in India 271.
1880
The yák, from which is reared a cross breed with the ordinary horned cattle of India locally called ‘zobu’.
R. Strachey in Encyclopædia Britannicavol. XI. 833/2
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
zho typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zho is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zho, n., 1840–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.