Lamb and mutton

Lamb, hogget, and mutton (UK, India, South Africa, Canada, Nepal, New Zealand and Australia) are terms for the meat of domestic sheep (species Ovis aries) at different ages.

A sheep in its first year is called a lamb, and its meat is also called lamb. The meat of a juvenile sheep older than one year is hogget; outside North America this is also a term for the living animal. The meat of an adult sheep is mutton, a term only used for the meat, not the living animals. The term mutton is sometimes used to refer to goat meat in the Indian subcontinent.

Lamb is the most expensive of the three types, and in recent decades sheep meat is increasingly only retailed as "lamb", sometimes stretching the accepted distinctions given above. The stronger-tasting mutton is now hard to find in many areas, despite the efforts of the Mutton Renaissance Campaign in the UK. In Australia, the term prime lamb is often used to refer to lambs raised for meat. Other languages, for example French and Italian, make similar, or even more detailed, distinctions between sheep meat by age and sometimes by gender, though these languages don't use different words to refer to the animal and its meat.