pastern

Etymology

From Middle English pastron, pastroun, pasturne, from Old French pasturon, diminutive of pasture (“shackle for a horse in pasture”), from Vulgar Latin pastōriā.

noun

1. The part of a horse's leg between the fetlock joint and the hoof.
   It was quite impossible to ride over the deeply-ploughed field; the earth bore only where there was still a little ice, in the thawed furrows the horse's legs sank in above its pasterns. 1918, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude (Oxford 1998), page 158
   Below me, somewhere in the horse-lines, stood Cockbird, picketed to a peg in the ground by a rope which was already giving him a sore pastern. 1928, Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Penguin, published 2013, page 227
2. (obsolete) A shackle for horses while pasturing.
3. (obsolete) A patten.
   Upright he walks, on pasterns firm and straight; His motions easy; prancing in his gait So straight she walk'd, and on her pasterns high.