Hoast
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A cough. dialectal
"in the winter time, right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, maybe, you'd hear an outbreak of hoasts fit to lift off the roof [...]."
- 2 Obsolete form of host. alt-of, obsolete
"After that Nero had raygned thirtene yeares: Otho and Galba one yeare, and ſix monethes: Veſpaſianus was counted a potent Pꝛince in Iudæa, amonge the armyes appoynted againſt the Ievves, and being pꝛoclaymed Emperour of the hoaſt that there was, foꝛthe with he is ſent to Rome, committing vnto his ſonne Titus the warres, in hande agaynſte the Ievves."
- 1 To cough. dialectal, intransitive
- 2 Obsolete form of host. alt-of, obsolete
Example
More examples"in the winter time, right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, maybe, you'd hear an outbreak of hoasts fit to lift off the roof [...]."
Etymology
From Middle English *host, *hoste, from Old Norse hósti (“a cough”), akin to Icelandic hósti, Swedish hosta, Danish hoste (“a cough”). More at whoost.
From Middle English *hosten, from Old Norse hósta (“to cough”), from Proto-Germanic *hwōstāną (“to cough”).
Variant forms.
More for "hoast"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.