Horse

How to spell horse

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce horse

What does horse mean?

1. nounA large four-legged mammal with hooves and a mane, kept for riding, racing, or pulling loads.
2. verbTo play roughly or fool about, usually in the phrase 'horse around'.
3. nounA padded gymnastics apparatus used for vaulting or pommel work.

Horse in a sentence

• noun

  She saddled the horse before the morning ride across the fields.

• verb

  The boys would horse around in the garden until dinner was ready.

• noun

  The gymnast leapt over the pommel horse with perfect form.

• noun

  The farmer hitched the horse to the plough at dawn.

• verb

  Please do not horse about near the swimming pool.

• noun

  The vaulting horse was wheeled into the centre of the gym.

Where does horse come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Horse is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English 'hors', which already meant the familiar hoofed animal. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form 'hrussa', the same source that gave Dutch 'ros' and the older German 'Ross'. Scholars are not entirely certain of the root beyond Germanic, though some link it to an ancient sense of 'running' or 'leaping', fitting for so swift an animal. Notice that the spelling keeps a silent 'e' on the end, which is exactly what separates it on the page from its homophone 'hoarse', meaning rough-voiced; the two sound identical but the animal has no 'a'. The word has been spelled with these same core letters for well over a thousand years, making it one of the steadiest words in the language.

How the word is built

• horse (single native root; no affixes)