bourne
See also: Bourne
English
Noun
bourne (countable and uncountable, plural bournes)
- (countable, archaic) A boundary.
- c. 1599–1602, Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1:
- But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover'd country from whose bourn[e] / No traveller returns
- 1879, Stevenson, Robert Louis, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes:
- […] and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead.
- 1889, Tennyson, Alfred, Crossing the Bar:
- For though from out our bourne of Time and Place,
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
-
- (archaic) A goal or destination.
- (countable) A stream or brook in which water flows only seasonally.
Derived terms
- (seasonal stream): nailbourne, winterbourne
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