hoarse

UK/hɔːs/

adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,638 of 15,258leans spoken

Hoarse means rough and harsh in the voice from strain. What is left after a night of shouting.

The causes are a cold, a football match, or too much talking, and the word describes the voice rather than the person, though you can say somebody is hoarse. It is a temporary condition, which separates it from gruff, which is how a voice simply is. The fixed phrase is shouting yourself hoarse. Take care with the spelling, since horse is a different word altogether and the two sound identical.

Definitions of hoarse

1adjectivehoarseOf a voice, rough and harsh from strain or illness.B2+
“He was hoarse by the end of the match.”

Where it comes from

Proto-Germanic
*haisaz
Old English
hās
Middle English
hors
English, today
hoarse

From Middle English hors, hos, from Old English hās, hārs, from Proto-Germanic haisaz, haisraz, akin to Old Norse háss (West Norse) and heiss (East Norse) (whence Icelandic hás, Norwegian Nynorsk hås, Norwegian Bokmål hes and Swedish hes).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire

First appears in chapter 5 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

hoarse in the wild

Both works describe him as a marquis who initially takes the form of a small horse before transforming into a hoarse-voiced human.
Gamigin
The primary symptom is loss of some vocal function, ranging from hoarse voice to no voice at all.
Laryngitis
Smoking can also contribute to a hoarse voice.
Hoarse voice
The characteristic sound of the jug is low and hoarse, below the higher pitch of the fiddle, harmonica, and the other instruments in the band.
Jug (instrument)
Kikki Danielsson had throat problems, which caused her voice to become more hoarse than usual.
En enda gång (song)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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