coach horn
English
Etymology
From coach + horn.
Noun
coach horn (plural coach horns)
- (historical) A long, straight, valveless instrument, traditionally made of copper, originally used as a signal horn on fast coaches.
- 1888, Athol Maudslay, Highways and Horses, page 453-454:
- An old guard, who writes upon the subject of coach-horns, calls attention to the fact of the difference existing between post and coach-horns by saying: "The coach-horn is now the only recognised horn used on a four-in-hand coach' but the post-horn, fifty or sixty years ago, was the recognised signal-hron used by all the guards on the fast mail coaches, hence the name post-horn."
- 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 4, in The Celebrity:
- Judge Short had gone to town, and Farrar was off for a three days' cruise up the lake. I was bitterly regretting I had not gone with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and I descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the direction of Mohair.
- 2003, Donna-Belle Garvin & James L. Garvin, On the Road North of Boston, →ISBN:
- The coach horn, sometimes referred to as a "yard-of-tin," could reach almost five feet in length.
- 2004, Søren Kierkegaard, (Thomas C. Oden, ed), The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology, →ISBN, page 51:
- A coach horn has infinite possibilities, and the person who puts it to his mouth and puts his wisdom into it can never be guilty of a repetition, and he who instead of giving an answer gives his friend a coach horn to use as he pleases says nothing but explains everything.
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