Other forms: harts
A hart is an adult male deer, in old use. A royal hart, hunt the hart, the hart at bay.
It means a red deer stag of five years or more and belongs to hunting language and to heraldry. It is a different word from heart, and the surnames Hart and Hartley come from it.
1nounhartAn adult male deer, in old use.
“The hunters followed the white hart deep into the forest.”
hart is a deer.
Old English heorot names a stag, with cognates across the Germanic languages.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱerh₂- — horn
Proto-Germanic
*herutaz
Proto-West Germanic
*herut
Old English
heorot — stag
Middle English
hert
English, today
hart
From Middle English hert, from Old English heorot (“stag”), from Proto-West Germanic herut, from Proto-Germanic herutaz (compare Dutch hert, German Hirsch, Danish -/Norwegian -/Swedish hjort), from Pre-Germanic kerudos, from Proto-Indo-European ḱerh₂- (“horn”). a doublet of Heorot. 2 Compare Welsh carw (“deer”), Latin cervus (“deer”), cervīx (“nape of the neck”), Lithuanian kárvė (“cow”), Russian коро́ва (“cow”), Ancient Greek κόρυδος (“crested lark”), κορυφή (“summit, crown of the head”), κορύπτω (“to butt with horns”), ae 𐬯𐬭𐬏, 𐬯𐬭𐬎𐬎𐬁 (“horn; claw, talon”), Sanskrit शरभ (“mythical antelope”). More at horn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire