horn
/hɔːn
/noun
1A hard permanent outgrowth, often curved and pointed, found in pairs on the heads of cattle, sheep, goats, giraffes, etc. and consisting of a core of bone encased in keratinized skin.At the end of these two cows' horns are attached, and to the horns two large goat skin bellows, one each side of the furnace....
- It is like looking at a pair of cattle horns, is it not?
- At the town's market, I had discovered the magnificent horns of a blue sheep while examining wildlife body parts being offered for sale.
1.1A woolly keratinized outgrowth, occurring singly or one behind another, on the snout of a rhinoceros.Is it the rhinoceros with its aphrodisiac horn and herbivorous browsing?...
- Now what about the issue of rhinoceros and the horns?
- The soldiers allegedly used the stolen money to buy items as diverse as cameras and rhinoceros horns, the officials said.
1.2A deer’s antler.Solid horns, called antlers, distinguish most species in the deer family from the other hoofed mammals....
- I ate my first bloody rare steak and you shot the coyote that still hangs in the family room next to one of your other first trophies, the thick horns of a mule deer.
- You could have been given spider webs and violet fabric to wrap your chancre or sip tea made from deer horns but you were most likely to be dosed up with toxic heavy metals.
1.3A horn-like projection on the head of another animal, e.g. a snail’s tentacle or the tuft of a horned owl.Many living animals have horns or hornlike organs; the list includes antelope, deer, chameleons, birds, and even ants....
- And I don't want to cut off the horns of a black snail.
- The creature within is like a huge snail with horns tipped by bright golden eyes.
1.4 (horns) archaic A pair of horns as an emblem of a cuckold.
1.5 [mass noun] West Indian Marital infidelity: she took endless horn and pressure, but now she wants a divorce
2 [mass noun] The substance of which horns are composed: powdered rhino horn...
- In Yemen, for example, rhino horn is carved into handles used in daggers called jambiyas.
- Throw a tax cut their way, the argument goes, and like lovers haplessly lost to the aphrodisiacal effects of ground rhino horn, they'll be putty in your hands.
- To date we've examined over 1,000 rhino horn pills; we've never found a real one.
2.1 [count noun] A receptacle made of horn, such as a drinking container or powder flask.Horns are used as butter dishes and large horns as cups for drinking mead....
- Drink was taken in horns, similarly decorated and sometimes with metal tips and rims.
- My current practice goes far better when I've had a couple of bottles / horns of beer or cider.
3A horn-shaped projection or object.America's riches are pulling people all along the continent's Hispanic horn on a great migration to the place they call El Norte....
- Half of the left uterine horn was fixed in Bouin's fixative, and processed routinely for immunohistochemistry.
- He stood up awkwardly and strolled mysteriously to the corner of the room where a peculiarly large gramophone horn dominated.
3.1A sharp promontory or mountain peak.Amongst the glowing purples and reds of a Saharan sunset the silhouette of Mount Ktrik, its peak formed from two horns, began to look very sinister....
- But rounding the horn and coming back up the peninsula was another story.
3.2 (the Horn) Cape Horn.
3.3An arm or branch of a river or bay.
3.4Each of the extremities of a crescent moon.The bowed bottom of the anchor recalls the horns of the crescent moon, an attribute of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the queen of heaven and the virgin mother of Horus....
- The horns of the crescent moon were pointed almost straight up.
- Also, at high latitudes (close to the poles) the Moon never sticks its horns straight up.
3.5British vulgar slang An erect penis.
4A wind instrument, conical in shape or wound into a spiral, originally made from an animal horn (now typically brass) and played by lip vibration.Around the clock, the coaches galloped down the towns' high streets with long brass horns blowing to warn pedestrians....
- Suddenly she turned and vanished from the parapet; and all the time the sentry upon the wall blew out the long note from his brass horn.
- It's the King coming and the sound of those who herald him with horns of brass pressed to their mouths.
4.1 short for French horn.The encore - Le Basque - by Marin Marais, arranged for horn and piano is an absolute charmer....
- During the summer months, she plays co-principal horn and is a featured soloist with the Capitol City Band.
- The brass section of an orchestra typically consists of trumpets, horns, trombones, and tubas.
4.2 informal (In jazz and popular music) any wind instrument: keyboards, horns, and drums...
- What You Want is a sweet love song, with some lazy Burt Bacharach style horns floating over the melody.
- It was easy for Buddy to copy the horn riffs on the songs on his guitar.
- The horns front a rhythm section that includes three percussionists armed with congas and bata drums, with no piano or guitar in the middle to mediate.
5A device sounding a warning or other signal: a car horn...
- Car drivers use their horns to signal their support.
- In Beijing the sounding of car horns is the exception, rather than the rule while Shanghainese seem to hardly ever take their hand off the klaxon button.
- In the third frame, the two clubs combined for four goals before the horn sounded to signal the end of the game.
verb [with object]
1(Of an animal) butt or gore with the horns: the bull horned him out of the way
2West Indian Be unfaithful to (one’s husband or wife): all the time he was horning his wife...
- They said ‘If yuh was getting horn, which would you prefer your partner to be horning you with, a member of the same sex or a member of the opposite sex?’
- In foreign countries, there is more horning, more deaths by murder and diseases of anger, more imprisonment, more self-abuse and abuse to others, and many Trinidadian families ask their family members to leave their homes.
- No parang song has ever created animosity, incited anarchy, induced horning, glorified carnage, supported drug abuse or unprotected sex, condoned domestic violence or maligned any person.
Phrases
blow (or toot) one's own horn
draw (or pull) in one's horns
on the horn
on the horns of a dilemma
Phrasal verbs
horn in
Derivatives
hornist
- It is likely that these works were written for two accomplished hornists, Joseph Nagel and Franz Zwierzina, who played in the Wallerstein court orchestra in the early 1780s.
- Marie Masters was the soloist, and the hornists were Richard King, David Brockett, Hans Clebsch and Richard Solis.
- Jaclyn, a student of D. Bruce Helm, also serves as the principal hornist for the Louisville Youth orchestra, where she has been a member for four years.
hornless
/ adjective ...- This particular type of animal is, indeed, extremely rare as hornless ewes comprise less than one per cent of this breed and total breed numbers are only around 5,000.
- The modern Irish hornless breed known as the Moylie is typically ‘red-brown with white faces, and a continuous white stripe along their backs, or almost entirely white with red ears and muzzles’.
- Increases in the mean male body size in a population are therefore predicted to cause increases in the threshold body size that separates horned and hornless male morphs.
horn-like
- This touch-sensitive work consists of a series of horn-like spikes protruding from two circular discs that are hung on a wall like a painting.
- Gilmour has inherited Wes Montgomery's style of playing horn-like lines on the guitar.
- How cassowaries produce their deep ‘boom’ is unclear, though Mack and his team speculate that cassowary communication is linked to the tall casques, or horn-like crests, that rise from the bird's head.
Origin
Old English, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch hoorn and German Horn, from an Indo-European root shared by Latin cornu and Greek keras.
The word horn is related to corn ‘a painful area of thickened skin’, and cornea (Late Middle English) through its ancestor Latin cornu ‘horn’. In to draw (or pull) in your horns, ‘to become less assertive or ambitious’, the image is of a snail drawing in its eyestalks and retreating into its shell when disturbed. See dilemma