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Hornbook   Listen
noun
Hornbook  n.  
1.
The first book for children, or that from which in former times they learned their letters and rudiments; so called because a sheet of horn covered the small, thin board of oak, or the slip of paper, on which the alphabet, digits, and often the Lord's Prayer, were written or printed; a primer. "He teaches boys the hornbook."
2.
A book containing the rudiments of any science or branch of knowledge; a manual; a handbook.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hornbook" Quotes from Famous Books



... letters and keep them out of harm's way. Mistress Elizabeth Delap, for that was her name, flourished in this capacity for upward of fifty years, and it was the pride and boast of her declining days, when nearly ninety years of age, that she was the first that had put a book (doubtless a hornbook) into Goldsmith's hands. Apparently he did not much profit by it, for she confessed he was one of the dullest boys she had ever dealt with, insomuch that she had sometimes doubted whether it was possible to make anything of him: a common case with imaginative children, who are apt to ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... thee I call, Who, grave and dull, in college or in hall Dost sit, all solemn sad, and moping weigh Things which, when found, thy labours can't repay— Nor, in one hand, fit emblem of thy trade, A rod; in t' other, gaudily array'd, A hornbook gilt and letter'd, call I thee, Who dost in form preside o'er A, B, C: 360 Nor (siren though thou art, and thy strange charms, As 'twere by magic, lure men to thine arms) Do I call thee, who, through a winding maze, A labyrinth of ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... injustice. FRENEAU was a rare character, and his pasquinades on RIVINGTON, a tory editor, are rich specimens. The confession he puts in the mouth of RIVINGTON, in his 'Address to the Whigs of New-York' immediately after the close of the war, is equal to 'Death and Dr. Hornbook' on the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... guidance of the writer Derrick, 'my first tutor in the ways of London, who shewed me the town in all its variety of departments, both literary and sportive,' he was now busily spelling through the pages of the Gull's Hornbook. From this course of idle dissipation he was saved by the interposition of an Ayrshire neighbour of the family, the Earl of Eglintoun, though were we to credit the account of the waif himself the Earl 'insisted that young Boswell should ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... of Frances Burney, from her ninth to her twenty-fifth year, well deserves to be recorded. When her education had proceeded no further than the hornbook, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself. Her father appears to have been as bad a father as a very honest, affectionate, and sweet tempered man can well be. He loved his daughter dearly; but it never seems to have occurred ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay



Words linked to "Hornbook" :   primer



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