Hosses

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Informal American dialect plural meaning horses, often used in a folksy or rural way of speaking
2. A colloquial Southern and Western term for the animals more commonly called horses
3. Folksy plural form of hoss, referring to several horses in casual rural or frontier speech

Etymology: "Hosses" is simply the plural of "hoss", a dialectal pronunciation of "horse" in which the initial h is kept but the vowel and final consonant are reshaped, so the form is best read as a spoken variant of the standard word rather than a separate creation. The plural follows the regular English pattern, adding "-es" after the sibilant ending "-s" of "hoss". The word is a good example of how English dialects handle the same root differently. Like "'oss" in regional speech, where the h is dropped entirely, "hoss" represents one of several phonetic shapes that "horse" has taken in colloquial and rural English. Writers have used such spellings to suggest a speaker's accent, which is why "hosses" appears mostly in dialogue, folk writing and informal speech rather than in formal prose.

Synonyms: horse, steed, nag