JT, in another thread, mentions the wonderful poem, The One Hoss Shay, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hoss is a great dialect spelling for horse where the r is dropped. (Cf. cuss for curse.) And shay is from the French word chaise, but with the final z-sound dropped. (Interestingly enough, the -se in French is pronounced, but here it dropped, perhaps as a hypercorrection, cf. the pronunciation of coup de grace as /kudəgra/ rather than the more accurate /kudəgras/.) Check out the rest of the poem for excellent examples of dialect spellings. Chaise itself has a fascinating history in that it is a phonetic variant of chaire, from Gk καθεδρα (kathedra); two homonyms in French, chair 'flesh' and cher 'dear', may have had an effect. In English, the French term chaise longue was borrowed into English where it is commonly mispronounced /ʃej(z)launʤ/, i.e., chais-lounge.)

quote: Hoss is a great dialect spelling for horse where the r is dropped.

OED lists 'hoss' as a word ("Dial. and U.S. var. of HORSE n.") and traces it back to 1815. This is well before the writing of author Holmes (1809-1894).

I didn't mean to imply that Holmes coined it, but that he used it.

I learned a poem in school about 45 years ago (YIKES !!) called "The Wonderful One Horse Shay. At least, that's how I remember the title. I was about a guy who set out to build a perfect sleigh with no single component weaker than any other, and it lasted 100 years and all the parts failed simultaneously. Could this be the same poem? Help an old man here....

Duncan,

That's the one. Zmj's link above (repeated here) gives the text (and illustrations!)