horn

UK/hɔːn/US/hɔɹn/

nounB14 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,473 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: horns

A horn is the hard pointed growth on an animal's head — two on a goat, a great curved pair on a bull, the single spike you draw on a unicorn. It is also the button you hit with the heel of your hand when the car in front sits still at a green light.

You sound the horn, you lean on the horn, and what comes out is a honk or a blast. A horn is a brass instrument as well — the French horn in an orchestra, and in jazz any instrument you blow — because the first ones were made from the real thing. Deer wear antlers, not horns, and the difference matters to anyone who has met both. The word lives in fixed phrases too: two people lock horns when they clash, and somebody blowing their own horn is telling you how good they are.

Definitions of horn

1nounanimalOne of the hard pointed growths on the head of a bull, goat, ram or rhino.B1~37%
“The bull lowered its head and swung its horns at the fence.”
2nounhornThe device on a vehicle that makes a loud warning sound, and the sound itself.B1~25%
“She pressed the horn and the sheep finally moved off the road.”
3nounbrassA brass instrument you play by blowing into it.B1~36%
“He plays horn in a small jazz band.”
4nounsmoothThe hard smooth material an animal's horns are made of, used for combs, buttons and handles.C1~2%
“The knife has a handle of polished horn.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 163 sentences found in the wild and placed 64 of them on a sense (99 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

lock horns — clash or argue head to head
blow your own horn — praise yourself out loud
on the horns of a dilemma — stuck between two choices, both bad
draw in your horns — become more careful, especially with money

Also practised as

nounOne of the hard pointed growths on the head of a bull or goat.

Where it comes from

Old English horn, and it has barely moved since — Dutch hoorn, German Horn and Gothic all sit beside it. Behind them is an ancient root, ḱerh₂-, meaning head or horn, which Latin took as cornū and Greek as κέρας. The thing on the animal came first and named everything afterwards, down to the earpiece of an early telephone, called a horn because it was shaped like one.

Middle English
horn
English, today
horn

From Middle English horn. From Middle English horn, horne, from Old English horn, from Proto-West Germanic horn, from Proto-Germanic hurną. Compare West Frisian hoarn, Dutch hoorn, Low German Hoorn, horn, German Horn, Danish - and Swedish horn, Gothic 𐌷𐌰𐌿𐍂𐌽. Ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ḱr̥h₂-nó-m, from ḱerh₂- (“head, horn”). Compare Breton kern (“horn”), Latin cornū, Ancient Greek κέρας, Proto-Slavic sьrna, cu сьрна (“roedeer”), hit (“horn”), Persian سر, Sanskrit शृङ्ग (“horn”). a doublet of corn and corno and cornu.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Travel & Transport, A Man Called Ove, Dinosaurs & Prehistory, Railways

First appears in chapter 4 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

horn in the wild

The horn is a brass instrument in the horn family, made of tubing wrapped into a coil with a large flared bell and rotary valves.
French horn
A musician who plays a horn is known as a horn player or hornist.
French horn
In Greek, it was called the horn of Amalthea, after Amalthea, a nurse of Zeus, who is often part of stories of the horn's origin.
Cornucopia
A market also exists for rhino horn dagger handles in Yemen, which was the major source of demand for rhino horn in the 1970s and 1980s.
Rhinoceros
A horn section is a group of musicians playing horns.
Horn section

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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.

Related words

Definitions of horn

1nounanimalOne of the hard pointed growths on the head of a bull, goat, ram or rhino.B1~37%

“The bull lowered its head and swung its horns at the fence.”

2nounhornThe device on a vehicle that makes a loud warning sound, and the sound itself.B1~25%

“She pressed the horn and the sheep finally moved off the road.”

3nounbrassA brass instrument you play by blowing into it.B1~36%

“He plays horn in a small jazz band.”

4nounsmoothThe hard smooth material an animal's horns are made of, used for combs, buttons and handles.C1~2%

“The knife has a handle of polished horn.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 163 sentences found in the wild and placed 64 of them on a sense (99 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.