hedgeborn - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
hedgeborn (not comparable)
- (obsolete) Born under a hedge or of low birth.
1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Sixt”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]:
Be quite degraded, like a hedge-born swine
- (obsolete) growing in a hedge
1869, George Eliot, How Lisa Loved the King:
The trader's child, whose soaring spirit rose
As hedge-born aloe-flowers that rarest years disclose
“hedgeborn”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.