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Osseʹo

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Son of the Evening Star. When “old and ugly, broken with age, and weak with coughing,” he married Oweenee, youngest of the ten daughters of a North hunter. She loved him in spite of his ugliness and decrepitude, because “all was beautiful within him.” One day, as he was walking with his nine sisters-in-law and their husbands, he leaped into the hollow of an oak-tree, and came out “tall and straight and strong and handsome;” but Oweenee at the same moment was changed into a weak old woman, “wasted, wrinkled, old, and ugly;” but the love of Osseʹo was not weakened. The nine brothers and sisters-in-law were all transformed into birds for mocking Osseo and Oweenee when they were ugly, and Oweenee, recovering her beauty, had a son, whose delight as he grew up was to shoot at his aunts and uncles, the birds that mocked his father and mother. (Longfellow Hiawatha, xii.).

 

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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.

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Ortwine
Orvietan
Os Sacrum
Osbaldistone
Oseway (Dame)
Osiris (in Egyptian mythology)
Osmand
Osnaburg
Osprey or Ospray (a corruption of Latin ossifragus, the bone-breaker)
Ossa
Osseo
Ossian
Ostend Manifesto
Oster-Monath
Ostler
Ostracism
Ostrich
Ostrich Brains
Ostrich Eggs in Churches
Ostrich Stomachs
Ostringers, Sperviters, Falconers