Other forms: hawthorns
A hawthorn is a thorny shrub with white blossom and red berries. A hawthorn hedge, hawthorn blossom, under the hawthorn.
It is the standard English hedging plant because it grows dense and thorny and takes cutting, and a great many field boundaries are hawthorn laid centuries ago. The blossom is May, and bringing it indoors was thought unlucky. Note that the haw is the berry, and the compound is haw plus thorn.
1nounhawthornA thorny shrub with white blossom and red berries.
“The hedges were white with hawthorn blossom in May.”
hawthorn is a shrub.
Old English hagathorn is haga, a hedge or haw, plus thorn. Hedge and haw come from the same enclosure.
Proto-West Germanic
*haguþorn
Old English
hagaþorn
Middle English
hawthorn
English, today
hawthorn
From Middle English hawthorn, from Old English hagaþorn, hæguþorn, from Proto-West Germanic haguþorn; equivalent to haw + thorn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire