Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday 24 October 2026 at 23:56
Here's little Jack Horner giving us a thumbs up. To be honest, I don't know why he sat in the corner, but I suspect it's because Horner and corner rhyme.
However a corner is quite an appropriate place for somebody called Horner to sit. Horner and corner share a common ancestor; both go back to an ancient root *ker-.
Corner comes from Latin cornu, 'horn' and has reached us from Anglo-French cornere. The modern sense of corner seems to have developed via first the word being applied to a region (think of 'The four corners of the world' and points of the compass), and then narrowed to an angle between walls, or a cosy nook.
Horner is an occupational name; a horner worked with horn, and horn is a close cognate ot cornu, but has reached us through the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Like many words that start with C is Latin (whic is a /k/ sound), the Germani equivalent starts with /h/.
Some examples are
canis - hound
caput - head
cor - heart
casa - house
centum - hundred
... and TIL, cannabis - hemp!
Image: Little Jack Horner 2 - WW Denslow - Project Gutenberg etext 18546.jpg, Public Domain.
Why Did Little Jack Horner Sit in a Corner?
Here's little Jack Horner giving us a thumbs up. To be honest, I don't know why he sat in the corner, but I suspect it's because Horner and corner rhyme.
However a corner is quite an appropriate place for somebody called Horner to sit. Horner and corner share a common ancestor; both go back to an ancient root *ker-.
Corner comes from Latin cornu, 'horn' and has reached us from Anglo-French cornere. The modern sense of corner seems to have developed via first the word being applied to a region (think of 'The four corners of the world' and points of the compass), and then narrowed to an angle between walls, or a cosy nook.
Horner is an occupational name; a horner worked with horn, and horn is a close cognate ot cornu, but has reached us through the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Like many words that start with C is Latin (whic is a /k/ sound), the Germani equivalent starts with /h/.
Some examples are
canis - hound
caput - head
cor - heart
casa - house
centum - hundred
... and TIL, cannabis - hemp!
Image: Little Jack Horner 2 - WW Denslow - Project Gutenberg etext 18546.jpg, Public Domain.