rhino
Pluralrhinos
- 1A large, thick-skinned plant-eating mammal with one or two horns on its snout, native to parts of Africa and Asia.
The ranger tracked a rhino through the dense brush before sunrise.
Poaching has pushed several rhino species toward extinction.
Similarrhinoceros
Note
A casual clipping of rhinoceros that long ago became the ordinary name for the animal. Delos W. Lovelace's King Kong (1932) has a cameraman filming "a charging rhino," and an East African newspaper report reprinted in 1961 tells of a mail train held up by "an angry rhino." Unlike the old slang for money, it counts normally, with the plural rhinos.
- 2Money, particularly ready cash or funds a person has on hand.
He gambled away all his rhino before the week was out.
—Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. Talking about hanging, I'll show you something you never saw
1922, James Joyce, “[Episode 12: The Cyclops]”Note
A word for cash whose origin no one has traced. It has no tie to the animal, which is a clipping of rhinoceros. It lives in voiced dialogue: in Thomas Holcroft's Anne St. Ives (1792) a man who has "got the rhino" may hold up his head, and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) still has Alf "chucking out the rhino." It is uncountable (the rhino, never a rhino), and today it is rare and sounds deliberately old-fashioned.
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Origin
A shortened form (clipping) of "rhinoceros."