Pet (noun) — a domesticated animal kept for companionship and pleasure rather than for work or food. I had always assumed the word pet came from the action. We pet our pets. Seemed perfectly reasonable. As it turns out, I was wrong. The verb came later. The pets came first. Somewhere in 16th-century Scotland, people began calling their hand-raised lambs pets —creatures kept not for utility, but for affection. Over time, the term expanded. By the late 1500s, any animal ke