Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An implement used in putting on a shoe, curved in two directions, in its width to fit the heel of the foot, and in its length to avoid contact with the ankle, used for keeping the stocking smooth and allowing the counter of the shoe to slip easily over it.
- noun Figuratively, anything by which a transaction is facilitated.
- noun A dangler about young women, encouraged merely to draw on other admirers.
- noun (b ) An article of food acting as a whet, especially intended to induce drinking of ale or the like.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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“Thank you,” quoth Amyas; “but I have drunk a mort of outlandish liquors, better and worse, in the last three years, and yet never found aught to come up to good ale, which needs neither shoeing-horn before nor after, but takes care of itself, and of all honest stomachs too, I think.”
Westward Ho! 2007
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But your pottle of sack is a fine shoeing-horn to pull on a loyal humour, and a merry one.
Kenilworth 2004
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A penny tract is the shoeing-horn of literature; it draws on a great many books, and some too tight to be very useful in walking.
The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 Various
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This, and some other desultory conversation, served as a shoeing-horn to draw on another cup of ale and another cheerer, as Dinmont termed it in his country phrase, of brandy and water.
Chapter XXIV 1917
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Heres Agamemnon, an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not so much brain as ear-wax: and the goodly transformation of Jupiter there, his brother, the bull, the primitive statue, and oblique memorial of cuckolds; a thrifty shoeing-horn in a chain, hanging at his brothers leg, to what form but that he is should wit larded with malice and malice forced with wit turn him to?
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She put a saucerful of butter, salt, and pepper near the fire to melt, for melted butter is the shoeing-horn that helps over a meal of potatoes.
Auld Licht Idylls 1898
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She put a saucerful of butter, salt, and pepper near the fire to melt, for melted butter is the shoeing-horn that helps over a meal of potatoes.
Auld Licht Idyls 1898
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A diversion in favour of the peasants was caused by Duke Ulrich of Würtemberg favouring the peasants 'cause, which he hoped to use as a shoeing-horn to his own plans for recovering his ancestral domains, from which he had been driven on the grounds of a family quarrel under the ban of the empire in 1519.
German Culture Past and Present Ernest Belfort Bax 1890
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All this talk about the Balance of Power, says another, is only “a shoeing-horn to draw on a standing army.”
Daniel Defoe Minto, William, 1845-1893 1879
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She put a saucerful of butter, salt, and pepper near the fire to melt, for melted butter is the shoeing-horn that helps over a meal of potatoes.
Stories by English Authors: Scotland (Selected by Scribners) Various 1878
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