alteration of earlier slogorn, from Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm army cry. From the early 16th cent. to the early 19th cent., slogan is known only in the works of Scottish writers. Its wider familiarity is almost certainly due to its use by Sir Walter Scott (see also note at derring-do), and by the mid-19th cent. it was in common use in a metaphorical sense. Archaic forms such as slogorne, sloghorne, and slughorne gave rise to the misapprehension by the poets Thomas Chatterton and Robert Browning that there was a type of trumpet called a ‘slughorn’