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Glite Dictionary
horn of plenty

horn of plenty

1 7.1
A horn filled with fruit and grain to show plenty
  • noun
  • /hɔrn əv ˈplɛnti/
translation icon : cornucopia
  • I have three ceramic turkeys and one little horn of plenty, or cornucopia.

Examples

  • The second project was always the horn of plenty.

    Blog text (28)

  • During the harvest festival, the horn of plenty overflowed with fresh vegetables and flowers.

  • It's like a horn of plenty.

    Idle Hands (1999)

  • l'm the horn of plenty!

    Pledge This! (2007)

  • Caption... "horn of plenty. "

    After Office Hours (1935)

  • Mine always looked like a fat, deformed elephant trunk, and I could never get it to look like the horn of plenty that was sitting on the teacher's desk.

    Blog text (28)

  • The horn of plenty containing everything delicious spills over onto that viceregal parade of the Espejo de Paciencia.

    Fiction book (2001)

  • The Thanksgiving decoration featured a stunning horn of plenty filled with fruits and nuts.

  • Every year, the school sets up a horn of plenty to celebrate abundance and community spirit.

Synonyms

cornucopia
vshorn of plenty
  • Literature
1 8.5

A horn-shaped decoration filled with fruit, flowers, and grains

is a symbolic image of abundance and nourishment rather than a physical container

Antonyms

lack
∞ 1.3

Not having something you need or want

scarcity
29 4.4

A situation where there is not enough of something people need

Surface Forms

horn of plenty singular
horns of plenty plural

Morphology

horn + of + plenty

The phrase literally combines 'horn' and 'plenty', so a learner who knows those words can infer it denotes a horn associated with abundance (i.e., a symbol or receptacle of plenty). This is a straightforward compositional pattern ('X of plenty') and thus readily interpretable without prior exposure.

Etymology

Horn of plenty comes from an old story about a goat whose broken horn was said to give endless food when people filled it, so artists showed a horn overflowing with fruit and grain. That's why horn of plenty is used as a symbol for 'abundance' today.