hoar
pronunciation
How to pronounce hoar in British English:
UK [hɔ:]
How to pronounce hoar in American English:
US [hoʊr]
-
- Noun:
- ice crystals forming a white deposit (especially on objects outside)
-
- Adjective:
- showing characteristics of age, especially having gray or white hair
Word Origin
- hoar
- hoar: [OE] Hoar now survives mainly in hoary, a disparaging term for ‘old’, and hoarfrost, literally ‘white frost’. Between them, they encapsulate the meaning of hoar – ‘greyishwhite haired with age’. But it is the colour that is historically primary, not the age. The word goes back to an Indo-European *koi-, whose other descendants include German heiter ‘bright’ and Russian ser’iy ‘grey’.Another Germanic offshoot was *khairaz – but here the association between ‘grey hair’ and ‘age, venerability’ began to cloud the issue. For while English took the word purely as a colour term, German and Dutch have turned it into a title of respect, originally for an elderly man, now for any man: herr and mijnheer respectively.=> hare, herring
- hoar (adj.)
- Old English har "hoary, gray, venerable, old," the connecting notion being gray hair, from Proto-Germanic *haira (cognates: Old Norse harr "gray-haired, old," Old Saxon, Old High German her "distinguished, noble, glorious," German hehr), from PIE *kei-, source of color adjectives (see hue (n.1)). German also uses the word as a title of respect, in Herr. Of frost, it is recorded in Old English, perhaps expressing the resemblance of the white feathers of frost to an old man's beard. Used as an attribute of boundary stones in Anglo-Saxon, perhaps in reference to being gray with lichens, hence its appearance in place-names.
Example
- 1. Surface hoar is actually common .
- 2. The propagation saw test seen in this video provides an excellent example of how poorly a layer of hoar supports the weight of the snow above .
- 3. Ever since daniel eggert first fell in love with pasque flowers among the first flowers of spring he had wanted to photograph them covered in hoar frost .
- 4. Overnight conditions along highway 14 , a few miles east of cedar city , utah , were just right to create a classic example of surface hoar .