• Pastern

    Pronunciation

    • UK IPA: /ˈpæstÉ™n/, /ˈpæstɜːn/
    • US IPA: /ˈpæstəɹn/

    Origin

    From Old French pasturon (French pâturon), from pasture ‘shackle’ (from Latin pastoria ‘shackle for pastured animal's foot’) + diminutive suffix.

    Full definition of pastern

    Noun

    pastern

    (plural pasterns)
    1. The area on a horse's leg between the fetlock joint and the hoof.
      • 1918, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998), page 158:It was quite impossible to ride over the deeply-ploughed field; the earth bore only where there was still a little ice, in the thawed furrows the horse's legs sank in above its pasterns.
      • 1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin 2013, p. 227:Below me, somewhere in the horse-lines, stood Cockbird, picketed to a peg in the ground by a rope which was already giving him a sore pastern.
    2. (obsolete) A shackle for horses while pasturing.
    3. (obsolete) A patten.
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