pastern

From Middle English pastron, pastroun, pasturne, from Old French pasturon, diminutive of pasture (“shackle for a horse in pasture”), from Vulgar Latin pastōriā.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈpæstən/, /ˈpæstɜːn/

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• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈpæstəɹn/

pastern (plural pasterns)

1. The part of a horse's leg between the fetlock joint and the hoof.
   • 1918, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998), page 158:

     It was quite impossible to ride over the deeply-ploughed field; the earth bore only where there was still a little ice, in the thawed furrows the horse's legs sank in above its pasterns.

   • 1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin 2013, p. 227:

     Below me, somewhere in the horse-lines, stood Cockbird, picketed to a peg in the ground by a rope which was already giving him a sore pastern.

2. (obsolete) A shackle for horses while pasturing[1].
3. (obsolete) A patten.
   • 1697, Virgil, “The Third Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], OCLC 403869432:

     Upright he walks, on pasterns firm and straight;
     His motions easy; prancing in his gait

     So straight she walk'd, and on her pasterns high.

• Napster, Panters, Partens, arpents, entraps, panters, parents, persant, trepans