hoast
hoast noun: a cough. Also the obsolete form of host.
Noun
hoast (plural hoasts)
- A cough.
- in the winter time, right in the middle of the Lord's Prayer, maybe, you'd hear an outbreak of hoasts fit to lift off the roof [...].1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song (A Scots Quair), Polygon, published 2006, page 17
Verb
hoast (third-person singular simple present hoasts, present participle hoasting, simple past and past participle hoasted)
- To cough.
Also used as
hoast is also the obsolete form of host.
Forms of hoast
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | hoasts |
| alternative form | haust |
| alternative form | host |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | hoasts |
| present participle | hoasting |
| past participle | hoasted |
| past | hoasted |
Origin of hoast
From Middle English *host, *hoste, from Old Norse hósti (“a cough”), akin to Icelandic hósti, Swedish hosta, Danish hoste (“a cough”). More at whoost.
From Middle English *hosten, from Old Norse hósta (“to cough”), from Proto-Germanic *hwōstāną (“to cough”).
Variant forms.
Questions about hoast
- What does hoast mean?
- Hoast means a cough.
- What part of speech is hoast?
- Hoast can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of hoast?
- The plural of hoast is hoasts.
Words near hoast in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hoast (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “hoast.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hoast. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.