a cow or heifer: the adult female of domestic cattle
This is the ordinary word for a cow, the female counterpart of the bull. It covers the whole range of the animal in daily life: a prized head of livestock given as a gift, a milk cow, a breeding cow that calves, or the plump grazing cattle of a rich pasture. When the age is in view it leans toward a heifer, a young cow, which is why the ritual animal set apart in the book of Numbers is usually called a red heifer.
The animal itself is neutral and valuable, so the word carries no built-in judgment. That matters for the two places where prophets turn it into an insult. When the same everyday word for a well-fed cow is aimed at people, the sting comes entirely from the comparison, not from anything negative in the word.
The two senses below simply separate the literal animal from these figures of speech. In both, the word means exactly the same creature; the difference is whether a real cow or a person pictured as one is in view.