hippogriff

plural hippogriffs · alternative hippogryph

1. human sciencesa mythical beast, half griffin and half horse, supposedly the offspring of a griffin and a filly.

   Oceanus himself follows on a hippogriff, and counsels Prometheus to submit to Zeus.

   1908, Edmund Doidge Anderson Morshead, Four Plays of Aeschylus, Introduction, page xiv

   4 more examples

   To talk of being able to ride with stirrups, is trifling: get on Pegasus, bestride the hippogryph, or mount the white nag in the Revelation.

   1732, July 18, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D., volume 12 published 1801, page 478

   Je crains done qu'il faudra que nous nous contentions de quelque moyen plus simple et plus facile, comme d'un enchanteur à gages, un hippogriffe, ou au moins de quelque génie bienfaisant, … So I doubt we must be content with some more simple and easy method, such as a magician in our pay, a hippogryph, or at least some kind genius, …

   1753, November 12, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, published with English translation in 1779 in Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, second edition, volume 3, lettre LXXIII, pages 298–299

   Yet the work is surely not a mere map of the hippogryffon wanderings of some disordered imagination…

   1800 Dec, Sir Richard Phillips, The Monthly magazine, volume 10, number 66, page 407

   I imagine a Hippogryph. The Hippogryph is at once the object of the act and the act itself. Abstract the one, the other has no existence: deny me the consciousness of the Hippogryph, you deny me the consciousness of the imagination; I am conscious of zero; I am not conscious at all.

   1831, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, volume 52, page 164