hart

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   an adult male deer, especially a red deer more than five years old

   A mature hart stood at the edge of the forest.

2. 2
   noun

   an obsolete or eye-dialect spelling of heart

   The speaker’s dialect spells heart as hart.

From Middle English hert, from Old English heorot ("stag"), from Proto-Germanic *herutaz, ultimately related to an Indo-European root associated with horns. The spelling hart was also formerly used for the unrelated word heart and survives in literary eye dialect.

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