Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A large leech, as Hæmopsis sanguisorba or Aulastoma gulo.—
- noun A horse-doctor, veterinary surgeon, or farrier.
- noun An inveterate beggar or dun; an extortionate person; one who makes incessant demands or drafts upon another.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) A large blood-sucking leech (
Hæmopsis vorax ), of Europe and Northern Africa. It attacks the lips and mouths of horses. - noun A farrier; a veterinary surgeon.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun obsolete A
veterinarian forhorses . - noun A type of sucking
worm , Haemopis sanguisuga, larger than the common leech.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun any of several large freshwater leeches
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word horse-leech.
Examples
-
Instruct me, some good horse-leech, to speak treason;
-
Instruct me, some good horse-leech, to speak treason;
-
There is not horse-leech that sticks so fast as your latter-day Philistine.
-
And clings and pulls — a horse-leech, whose deep maw 190
-
That leaves vast stretches of territory without anyone that a sick or injured farmer can turn to - not an earth-witch, not a hedge-wizard, not even a horse-leech.
-
Apart from a broken nose, his skull was fractured in the fall, and for a couple of days he hung on the edge, with a Bristol horse-leech working like fury to save him from going over.
-
Apart from a broken nose, his skull was fractured in the fall, and for a couple of days he hung on the edge, with a Bristol horse-leech working like fury to save him from going over.
-
M. M.rat was a logician of this sort, and M. Romieu is, after all, only a pale imitator of the cracked horse-leech; but as he wrote in the interest of "order," and for the preservation of property, we rarely hear of his thirst for blood.
-
The Bey and his staff were legitimate descendants of the two daughters of the horse-leech; their daily cry was, "Give! give!"
-
Are you like the horse-leech, ever crying, 'Give, give!' still wanting more profit, and never thinking you have enough?
chained_bear commented on the word horse-leech
"'I was apprenticed to a horse-leech in Charleston when I was a boy.'"
--O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea, 136
This is an archaic (I hope) term for a veterinary surgeon or horse doctor.
March 14, 2008