What is Horse Vocabulary?

Well, horses have worked with humans for literally thousands of years, and through that time we have developed a vocabulary with the horse, and a specialized one at that. We have words and language for virtually every horse behavioral train, and anatomical characteristic with an extremely high accuracy as far as that goes. Horses are oft referred to by their coat color while in the field and the genetics of coat colors has been resolved, although some debates continue about the exact finer details. In English a horse is measured in hands, which is usually displayed as “hh” or “h” and it is a way of measuring a horses hight. One hand is usually around four inches, or as defined in English Law, 101.6 millimeters. Heights that are not solidly a hand are then measured in hands and the additional inches that are less than another hand. So a horse that is 15 hands is 60 inches, about a meter and a half in height.

In horse anatomy there are many terms that are related to these special vocabulary terms that may not make much sense to someone who has never been around horses. The back is right behind the withers, where the saddle goes, the chin groove is the part of the head on a horse that is right behind the lower lip, the crest is the upper part of the neck where the mane grows, the cannon is between the knee and the fetlock joint, the frog is the highly elastic wedge shaped mass on the underside of the hoof, the hock is the tarsus of the horse - like the human heel, the mane is the long coarse hair that sprouts from the dorsal ridge on a horses neck, the muscle is the chin and mouth (like a dog) and the splints are bones found on each of the legs, on either side of the cannon bone (there are eight of these bones) and they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever.

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