hippotaur

English

Etymology

From Latin hippotaurus, from Ancient Greek ἱππόταυρος (hippótauros), from ἵππος (híppos, “horse”) (English hippo-) + ταῦρος (taûros, “bull”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈhɪpə.tɔː/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈhɪpə.tɔɹ/, /ˈhɪpə.tɑɹ/

Noun

hippotaur (plural hippotaurs)

1. A creature that is half bull and half horse.
   • 1982 May 1, Graham Anderson, Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play‎^[1], number 9, Scholars Press, →ISBN, page 37:

     Cnemon is surprised even by the shadow of a crocodile, while Nausicles smiles at a foolish bird-catcher sent to catch the phoenicopter; or the giraffe terrifies the Ethiopians at a point in the plot when surprise is least expected - before Theagenes improvises a hippotaur to deal with it. This is again the world of Herodotus-at-the-Zoo.

   • 1999 January 29, Heliodorus (of Emesa.), edited by Moses Hadas, Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance‎^[2], reprint edition, University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN, page 267:

     Theagenes was extolled to the skies for having welded the novel team into a hippotaur.

   • 2014 July 14, Shadi Bartsch, “FIVE. The Other Descriptions: Relation to Narrative and Reader”, in Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius‎^[3], reprint edition, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 148:

     Hence, we have a Thessalian doing battle not with a man-horse (centaur) but with a bull-horse (hippotaur), and although the analogy has its weaknesses, it is certainly suggestive of the earlier fight.

   • 2019 May 7, B. P. Reardon, “Heliodorus AN ETHIOPIAN STORY”, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels‎^[4], 2 edition, Univ of California Press, →ISBN, page 675:

     So precisely did he correlate the speed of the two racing animals animals that from a distance the two heads sprang from a single neck, and they acclaimed Theagenes as a hero who had brought so strange a team, a hippotaur, a creature half bull, half horse, beneath the yoke.

   • 2023 May 4, Marília Futre Pinheiro, Massimo Fusillo, Stephen A. Nimis, “Animals as a Means of Characterisation in Heliodorus Aethiopica”, in Modern Literary Theory and the Ancient Novel: Poetics and Rhetoric‎^[5], volume 30, Barkhuis, →ISBN, page 119:

     The striking image of his horse in parallel to the bull so that they look like a hybrid animal, a hippotaur, governed by one man (29,5), makes true the image of the Lapiths defeating the hybrid Centaurs pictured on his mantle (3,3,5).

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:hippotaur.

Synonyms

• jumart

Related terms

• hippogriff
• minotaur

See also

• centaur