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pastern

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Etymology

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From Middle English pastron, pastroun, pasturne, from Old French pasturon, diminutive of pasture (“shackle for a horse in pasture”), from Vulgar Latin pastōriā.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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pastern (plural pasterns)

  1. The part of a horse's leg between the fetlock joint and the hoof.
    • 1918, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998), page 158:
      It was quite impossible to ride over the deeply-ploughed field; the earth bore only where there was still a little ice, in the thawed furrows the horse's legs sank in above its pasterns.
    • 1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin, published 2013, page 227:
      Below me, somewhere in the horse-lines, stood Cockbird, picketed to a peg in the ground by a rope which was already giving him a sore pastern.
  2. (obsolete) A shackle for horses while pasturing.[1]
  3. (obsolete) A patten.
    • 1697, Virgil, “The Third Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC:
      Upright he walks, on pasterns firm and straight;
      His motions easy; prancing in his gait
      So straight she walk'd, and on her pasterns high.

Translations

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References

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  1. ^ Edward H[enry] Knight (1877) “Pastern”, in Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary. […], volumes II (GAS–REA), New York, N.Y.: Hurd and Houghton […], →OCLC.

Anagrams

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