pastern

From Old French pasturon (French pâturon), from pasture ‘shackle’ (from Latin pastoria ‘shackle for pastured animal's foot’) + diminutive suffix.

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

pastern (plural pasterns)

1. The area on 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.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Knight to this entry?)

3. (obsolete) A patten.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Dryden to this entry?)

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