Talk:Alicorns/@comment-6196249-20130308071630

"Alicorn" was originally used to describe the horn of the unicorn.

While Piers Anthony mentioned the term as a winged unicorn first, in 1984, in his book "Bearing an Hourglass", the first recorded instance of the word is from the 1930 book "The Lore of the Unicorn" by   Odell Shepard of  London.

The most self-explanitory quote from the book being the following; " " Thomas Bartholinus certainly exaggerates the influence of the Danish discovery when he implies that it stopped the traffic in narwhal tusks. "Our merchants would have filled whole ships with this pretended horn", says he, "and would have sold it all through Europe as true  alicorn, if the deceit had not been detected by experts."""

Of course, this settles the discussion of what an Alicorn is, and what the word means, if one judges the word's proper usage entirely on the facts of the word's historical literary usage, as opposed to etymological  speculation.