Wait- do we call them rams because that is what they do, or was ram(the verb) "a thing" prior to the discovery of "ram(the animal) and the shepherds thought "we need a name for those horny male sheep that keep ramming their fucking heads together"?
Your question got me curious. Seems the oldest form of the word is Norse and means “strong,” and it does appear that it was used as a verb (to ram) before it was used as a noun (a ram)
Fun fact 2: in French it's other way around. The male sheep is a -bélier-and for the verb we have another noun which is also - bélier-but now it's an object used to ram something in. For example : "the gangsters used a voiture-bêlier (a Ramming car) to force their entry to the bank''. The word bélier comes from the flemish word Bel which means bell because the male sheep had the bell around its neck. The astrology sign Aries is also called bélier in French but that came much more recently as the Latin word aries was used in old French too for both the sign and the animal.
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