heautarit, quicksilver. B. Jonson, Alchem. ii. 1 (Surly). Arab. ʿuṭârid, the planet Mercury; also, quicksilver (Steingass).
heave a bough, rob a booth or shop. (Cant.) Middleton, Roaring Girl, v. 1 (Trapdoor); ‘To heve a bough, to robbe or rifle a boeweth [booth]’, Harman, Caveat, p. 84.
heave and ho, a cry of sailors in heaving the anchor, &c.; hence, with might and main; ‘With heaue and hoaw on Bacchus name they shout’, Phaer, Aeneid vii, 389; ‘Heue and how’, Skelton, Bowge of Courte, 252.
heben, ebony; ‘Hebene, Heben or Ebony, the black and hard wood of a certain tree growing in Aethiopia and the East Indies’, Cotgrave; heben wood, Spenser, F. Q. i. 7. 37. L. hebenus, Gk. ἔβενος, the ebony tree; cp. Heb. hobnîm, billets of ebony (Ezek. xxvii. 15).
hebenon, name given to some substance having a poisonous juice, Hamlet, i. 5. 62; hebon, Marlowe, Jew of Malta, iii. 4 (Barabas). Cp. Gower, C. A. iv. 3017, ‘Bordes Of hebenus that slepi Tree’, borrowed from Ovid, Metam. xi. 610 ff., ‘Torus est ebeno sublimis . . . Quo cubat ipse deus membris languore solutis.’
hecco, the woodpecker; ‘The laughing hecco’, Drayton, Pol. xiii. 80; ‘The sharp-neb’d hecco’, The Owl, 206. Cp. Glouc. heckwall, see EDD. (s.v. Hickwall).
heckfer, a heifer. Phaer, tr. of Aeneid, xi. 811; ‘Heckfare, bucula’, Levins, Manip. ME. hekfere, ‘juvenca’ (Prompt.); ‘buccula, juvenca’ (Voc. 758. 3). Formerly in prov. use in the north country and in E. Anglia, but now obsolete, see EDD. (s.v. Heifer).
heedling, headlong. Ascham, Toxophilus, p. 58; ‘To tumble a man heedlinge down the hyll’, Cranmer, Pref. to Bible; precipitately, ‘His armie flying headling back againe’, Knolles, Hist. Turks (ed. 1621, 170).
heft, weight. Mirror for Mag., Salisbury, st. 15. Hence, stress, need, emergency; ‘Forsooke each other at the greatest heft’, Ferrex, st. 5. In common prov. use in the midland and southern counties: it means weight, esp. the weight of a thing as ascertained by lifting it in the hand, see EDD. (s.v. Heft, sb.1 1).
heggue, a hag, malicious female sprite; ‘Heggues that are seen in the feldes by night like Fierbrandes’, Arber, tr. of Apoph., Socrates, § 23; ‘The ayery heggs’, Mirror for Mag., Cobham, st. 31.