THORN

Thorn

Thorn or þorn is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland where it survives. The letter originated from the rune in the Elder Fuþark, and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. Its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name is Thurisaz.

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thorn

Noun

  1. A sharp protective spine of a plant.
  2. Any shrub or small tree that bears thorns.
    the white thorn; the cockspur thorn
  3. That which pricks or annoys; anything troublesome.
  4. A letter of the Latin alphabet (capital: Þ, small: þ), borrowed by Old English from the futhark to represent a dental fricative, then not distinguished from eth, but in modern use (in Icelandic and other languages, but no longer in English) used only for the voiceless dental fricative found in English thigh

Verb

  1. To pierce with, or as if with, a thorn


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: thorn
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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