- a female horse or donkey compare brood mare, filly, stallionTopics Animalsc2
- (British English, informal) a nightmare (= an experience that is very frightening and unpleasant, or very difficult to deal with)
- The journey home was a bit of a mare as all of the trains were delayed.
- I had a complete mare booking tickets for the concert.
Word Originnoun Old English mearh ‘horse’, mere ‘mare’, from a Germanic base with cognates in Celtic languages meaning ‘stallion’. The sense ‘male horse’ died out at the end of the Middle English period.
Idioms
See mare in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionarya mare’s nest
- a discovery that seems interesting but is found to have no value
- a very complicated situation
- This area of the law is a veritable mare’s nest.
Check pronunciation:
mare