hoar - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Middle English hor, hore, from Old English hār (“hoar, hoary, grey, old”), from Proto-West Germanic *hair, from Proto-Germanic *hairaz (“grey”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ḱeh₃- (“grey, dark”). Cognate with German hehr (“noble, sublime”), Herr (“sir, gentleman”), Scottish Gaelic ciar (“dusky”), and Russian се́рый (séryj, “grey”).

hoar

  1. A white or greyish-white colour.
    hoar:
  2. Hoariness; antiquity.
    • 1796, Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, 10th edition, London: For J. Owen, and F. and C. Rivington, page 52:
      His grants are engrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages.

colour

antiquity

hoar (not comparable)

  1. Of a white or greyish-white colour.
    Synonym: frosty
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 10:
      So forth they rowèd; and that ferryman / With his stiff oars did brush the sea so strong, / That the hoar waters from his frigate ran, / And the light bubbles danced all along. / Whiles the salt brine out of the billows sprong.
  2. (poetic) Hoarily bearded.
    • 1751, Thomas Warton, Newmarket, a Satire:
      And lo, where rapt in beauty's heavenly dream
      Hoar Plato walks his olived Academe.
    • 1847 November 1, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie, Boston, Mass.: William D. Ticknor & Company, →OCLC, (please specify either |part=I or II):
      This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
      Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
      Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
      Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
  3. (obsolete) Musty; mouldy; stale.
  4. (archaic) Figuratively, grey-haired with age.
    • 1648, Lancelot Andrewes, A manual of directions for the sick with many sweet meditations and devotions of the R. Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrews, late L. Bishop of Winchester: to which are added praiers for the morning, evening and H. communion‎[1], page 202:
      Be Thou with me until Old-age, and even to hoar hairs do Thou carrie me. P. Isa. 46.4.
    • 1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XVI, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume I, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 173:
      The great popularity of the Stuarts—certainly more allied to personal causes than we can at present calculate—is a curious fact. It was not one of those feelings drawn from hoar antiquity, when habit has become religion.

hoar (third-person singular simple present hoars, present participle hoaring, simple past and past participle hoared)

  1. (obsolete, intransitive) To become mouldy or musty.

From Middle High German hār, from Old High German hār. Compare German Haar, Dutch haar, English hair, Swedish hår.

hoar n

  1. (Gressoney, anatomy) hair (the long hair on a person's head)

hoar

  1. indefinite plural of ho

hoar

  1. present indicative of hoa