bourne

• (with the horse-hoarse merger)
  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /bɔːn/
  • (General American) IPA^(key): /boɹn/, [bo̞ɹn], /bʊɹn/[1][2][3]
  • Homophone: borne (see there for more)
  • Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)n
• (without the horse–hoarse merger)
  • (rhotic) IPA^(key): /boːɹn/
  • (non-rhotic) IPA^(key): /boən/

Middle French borne, from Old French bodne, from Medieval Latin bodina, a word of unknown ultimate origin, but possibly from Proto-Indo-European *bʰudʰmḗn (“bottom, base”), see also Proto-Celtic *bundos.[4]

bourne (countable and uncountable, plural bournes)

1. (countable, archaic) A boundary; a limit.
   • c. 1599–1602, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1:

     But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscover'd country from whose bourn[e] / No traveller returns

   • 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes:

     […] and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead.

   • 1889, Alfred Tennyson, Crossing the Bar:

     For though from out our bourne of Time and Place,
     The flood may bear me far,
     I hope to see my Pilot face to face
     When I have crossed the bar.

2. (archaic) A goal or destination.

From Middle English bourne, from Old English burna. Doublet of burn.

bourne (plural bournes)

1. (countable) A stream or brook in which water flows only seasonally; a small stream or brook.

• (seasonal stream): nailbourne, winterbourne
• (placenames): Middlebourne

• (seasonal stream): bourn (“small stream”), burn (“stream”)

• unbore, unrobe