Slughorn

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Horace Slughorn is a fictional wizard and former Hogwarts Potions master who collects talented students in J. K. Rowling's novels
2. The name of a character from the Harry Potter books, a genial Potions teacher at Hogwarts known for gathering promising pupils around him
3. A fictional magical professor of potions at Hogwarts School in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, famous for his fondness for prodigies

Etymology: Thomas Chatterton, the English poet who wrote pseudo-medieval verse in the 1760s, is the source of the instrument people now picture when they see this word. In his poems, "slughorn" was a battle cry, but he also described it in footnotes as a warlike instrument of music, "a musical instrument not unlike a hautboy" and "war trumpets." That mistaken sense stuck. Robert Browning carried it into his 1855 poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," and Terry Pratchett used it in 1989 as a deliberate nod back to Chatterton. The word's true meaning is the older one. It goes back to Celtic roots connected with a host or army, combined with a word for a call or cry, so the original sense was a war shout rather than a horn. The Irish and Scottish Gaelic forms "sluagh-ghairm" preserve that meaning, and it is from this that the English word derives.