Words - skip - Brewer’s

Colt’s-tooth

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The love of youthful pleasure. Chaucer uses the word “coltish” for skittish. Horses have at three years old the colt’s-tooth. The allusion is to the colt’s teeth of animals, a period of their life when their passions are strongest.

1

“Her merry dancing-days are done;

She has a colt’s-tooth still, I warrant.”

King: Orpheus and Eurydice

“Well said, Lord Sands;

Your colt’s-tooth is not cast yet.”

Shakespeare: Henry VIII., i. 3.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.