different between hirn vs girn

English

Etymology

From Middle English hirne, herne, from Old English hyrne (“horn, corner, angle”), from Proto-West Germanic *hurnij?, from Proto-Germanic *hurnij? (“horn, corner, angle”), from Proto-Indo-European *?erh?-. Proto-Germanic *hurnij? is a diminutive form of *hurn?, from which comes English horn. Cognate with Old Frisian herne (“horn, corner, angle”), Old Norse hyrna (“corner”), Norwegian Bokmål hjørne (“corner”) (Bokmål), Norwegian Nynorsk hyrna (“corner”) (Nynorsk), Icelandic hyrna (“point of an axehead, mountain peak”). More at horn.

Noun

hirn (plural hirns)

1. (Britain dialectal, Northern England, Scotland) Corner; nook; hiding-place

Anagrams

• rhin-

Middle English

Noun

hirn

1. Alternative form of herne (“corner”)

Scots

Alternative forms

• hirne, hyrn, hyrne

Etymology

From Middle English herne, hirne, from Old English hyrne (“horn, corner, angle”), from Proto-Germanic *hurnij? (“horn, corner, angle”), from Proto-Indo-European *?erh?- (“horn”). Cognate with Old Frisian herne (“horn, corner, angle”), Norwegian hyrna (“corner”), Icelandic hyrna (“point of an axehead, mountain peak”). More at horn.

Noun

hirn (plural hirns)

1. corner; nook

   To ilka hirn he takes his rout / And gangs just stavering about / In quest o'prey. — C. Keith.

2. a hiding-place

Usage notes

• Usually plural

Derived terms

• hirnek

English

Alternative forms

• gurn
• gurne

Etymology

Metathesized form of grin.

Verb

girn (third-person singular simple present girns, present participle girning, simple past and past participle girned)

1. (dialectal) To grimace; to snarl.
   • 1999, Jessica Stirling, The Wind from the Hills, St Martin's Press.

     At seventy-five or eighty I will be like a child myself, frail and cantankerous, a girning, burdensome old devil.

2. (Scotland, Northern England) To whinge, moan, complain.
   • 2008, James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy, Penguin 2009, p. 107:

     And Jim was just girning all the time. I telled him to shut it.

3. (intransitive) To make elaborate unnatural and distorted faces as a form of amusement or in a girning competition.

Noun

girn (plural girns)

1. A vocalization similar to a cat's purring.
   • 2002, edited by Richard J. Davidson, Handbook of Affective Sciences, Oxford University Press, p. 569:

     A different vocalization, a girn, simiular to a cat's purring, was observed in infants reunited with their mothers...

See also

• gowl

Anagrams

• NGRI, Ring, grin, ring