half assn.¹

1587 Sir P. Sidney & A. Golding tr. P. de Mornay Trewnesse Christian Relig. xxvi. 473 A Hafeasse of Persia [Fr. vng Perse demi Asne] shal come and make vs his thralles.

1616 H. Ainsworth Annot. First Bk. Moses, called Genesis xxxvi. sig. Cc/1 It is knowen that mules are ingendred of the mixture of horses & asses,..as Plinie sheweth in Histor. b. 8. ch. 44. (translated commonly therfore in Greek hemi-onous, that is half-asses 1. King. 10, 25, &c.) and mules of themselves are barren.

a1763 J. Byrom Misc. Poems (1773) I. 290 Poor Dogs of some Sort, and impeccant Half-Asses.

1861 Southern Lit. Messenger 32 ii. 131 Simonides, when offered a small price for an ode in honor of a victory in a mule race, contemptuously calls the successful animals half-asses.

2006 R. L. Koenig Fourth Horseman vi. 104 A mule—also known as a ‘half ass’—is a male offspring of the breeding of a donkey and a horse.

a1667 G. Hughes Analyt. Expos. Bk. Moses (1672) 148/2 Mules,..half asses and camels.

1855 E. Blyth Let. 8 Dec. in C. Darwin Corr. (1989) V. 521 I think I have proved that only one species is known, which is the Ghor-Khur (or ‘Horse-Ass’), hemionus (or ‘half-Ass’) hemippus (or ‘½ horse’), &c.

1891 J. W. Buel Living World 560 The Hemione, Kiang, Koulon, Half-ass, Mountain Ass, Dgiggitai, Dzigethai (Equus polyodon), has..as many names as a Spanish nobleman.

1973 Amer. Jrnl. Archaeol. 77 282/1 The wall paintings..depict a variety of hunting scenes in which the prey consists of deer, pigs, half-asses, and apparently wild cattle.

2012 B. A. Pierce Genetics (ed. 4) 592/2 African wild asses and Asian half asses are genetically distinct: they formed two completely separate groups in the evolutionary tree.