licorne

 

From French licorne, calque of Russian единоро́г (jedinoróg, “unicorn”).

licorne (plural licornes)

1. (historical, military) A type of muzzle-loading gun-howitzer used by the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.
   • 1824, “Answers of Sir A. D., K. C. B. of the Royal Artillery, to some questions from Lieutenant C. D. Bengal Artillery”, in The British Indian Military Repository, volume 3:

     But I think our new 24-pounder howitzer will be found superior to any of them, not even excepting the Russian Licorne.

   • 1837, T. F. Simmons, Ideas as to the Effect of Heavy Ordnance Directed Against and Applied by Ships of War, etc.:

     The Russians have a howitzer denominated licorne, the bore of which is, in its whole extent, the truncated frustrum of a cone: the only field guns in the possession of the artillery at Corfu, in 1822, were Russian guns of this description.

   • 2007, Jeff Kinard, “Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century artillery”, in Artillery: An Illustrated History of Its Impact:

     Essentially a hybrid between a howitzer and a gun, thus a gun-howitzer, the licorne was capable of a flatter trajectory and a longer range than the conventional howitzer.

•   licorne on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

From Old French unicorne via reanalysis as une icorne (with indefinite article), followed by further reanalysis of the new definite form l'icorne,^[1] or from Italian alicorno, variant of liocorno.^[2]

• IPA^(key): /li.kɔʁn/

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licorne f (plural licornes)

1. (mythology) unicorn
2. (heraldry) unicorn
3. (finance) unicorn (startup whose valuation has exceeded one billion U.S. dollars)

• “licorne”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Borrowed from French licorne.^[1][2]

• Hyphenation: li‧cor‧ne

licorne m (plural licornes)

1. unicorn

   Synonym: unicórnio