“ Ony persone … that wyll not helpe Constable sergeauntis and other officers … when hue and Crye is made.” The OED has two questionable citations from the late 1200s for “hue and cry,” but the first definite example is from a chronicle written in the early 1500s by the London merchant Richard Arnold: The expression “hue and cry,” which came into English by way of the Anglo-Norman hu e cri, was originally a legal phrase that referred to an outcry by a victim, a constable, or others, calling for the pursuit of a felon. The Old French verb huer meant to hoot, cry, or shout. That sense is now obsolete, surviving only in the expression “hue and cry.”Įnglish borrowed the clamorous “hue” from an Old French noun (written hu, hui, huy, or heu ) meaning an outcry, a war cry, or a hunting cry. that raised by a multitude in war or the chase”-showed up in the 1300s, according to the OED. The other “hue”-the one meaning “outcry, shouting, clamour, esp. The first color citation refers to “brunes heowes.” The Oxford English Dictionary ’s earliest examples of those senses of the word are from the Blickling Homilies, a collection of Old English sermons dating from 971. In Anglo-Saxon times, the noun “hue” (written hiew, hiw, or heow ) referred to the shape of something as well as its color, but the shape sense is now considered obsolete. Q: Is the “hue” in the expression “hue and cry” related to the “hue” that refers to color?Ī: No, the “hue” in “hue and cry” is a horse of another color.
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