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Glite Dictionary
📯 A public outlawing 🐮 Using horns
horning

horning

1 9.9
A public ceremony in old Scotland that declared a person who owed money an outlaw
  • noun
  • Archaic
translation icon : sonado
  • During the historical horning ceremony, a horn was sounded to announce the outlaw status of the debtor.

Examples

  • Yet the effects are plain to see: repeated horning debarks stems, breaks branches, and eventually kills the aboveground part of a tree.

    Academic text (2006)

  • In Scotland, the practice of horning allowed creditors to publicly declare their debtors as outlaws.

  • The horning of debtors was a significant event in medieval Scottish society, marking individuals as outcasts.

Surface Forms

horning singular
hornings plural

Morphology

horning = horn (opaque) = horn + ing

The form is built from horn + -ing, but the Scottish legal meaning is a specialized historical term that is not predictable from the parts.

Etymology

Horning comes from an old Scottish practice where people would blow a horn to 'announce' that someone owed money and was declared outside the law. So horning became the name for that public legal shaming of a debtor.