bourn1
/bɔːn
/ /bʊən /noun dialect
A small stream, especially one that flows intermittently or seasonally.One of the many good touches in this book is its linguistic bent, as in the explanation of tilth and bourn, farming terms carried as baggage to the American Utopia....
- I-I-I don't get you, he says thickly, in a stuttered upper-pitch that probably succeeds in shaving a bourne of phlegm off his wind-pipe.
- But it seems likely that all sorcery will vanish with the bourns.
Origin
Middle English: southern English variant of burn2.
Rhymes
bourn2
/bɔːn/ /bʊən /(also bourne)
noun literary
1A limit or boundary.In works such as these, the paint-splattered canvases, which suggest the wilder bourns of Abstract Expressionism, are subjected to all manner of indignities....
- These spaces of dispersion are marked with bourns which disappear amid the fields of scree as stones.
1.1A goal or destination.Northern Afghanistan was to these Assyrian kings the dumping ground for unconsidered numbers of slaves; a bourn from which no captive ever returned....
- It's quite hard to say, ‘The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveller returns’ when your mum has just died. ‘If it be not now yet it will come.
- Many more men were taken ‘to that bourne from whence no traveller [sic] returns.’
Origin
Early 16th century (denoting a boundary of a field): from French borne, from Old French bodne (see bound2).