BOURNE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does bourne mean? 

• BOURNE (noun)
  The noun BOURNE has 2 senses:

1. an archaic term for a boundary

2. an archaic term for a goal or destination

  Familiarity information: BOURNE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• BOURNE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

An archaic term for a boundary

Classified under:

Nouns denoting spatial position

Synonyms:

bourn; bourne

Hypernyms ("bourne" is a kind of...):

bound; boundary; bounds (the line or plane indicating the limit or extent of something)

Sense 2

Meaning:

An archaic term for a goal or destination

Classified under:

Nouns denoting cognitive processes and contents

Synonyms:

bourn; bourne

Hypernyms ("bourne" is a kind of...):

end; goal (the state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it)

 Context examples 

Yes, I knew the character of this landscape: I was sure we were near my bourne.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I could only think of the bourne of my travels and the work which was to occupy me whilst they endured.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Nigh two months had Alleyne Edricson been in Castle Twynham—months which were fated to turn the whole current of his life, to divert it from that dark and lonely bourne towards which it tended, and to guide it into freer and more sunlit channels.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

No. I lay in my basket, and my mother lay in her bed; but Betsey Trotwood Copperfield was for ever in the land of dreams and shadows, the tremendous region whence I had so lately travelled; and the light upon the window of our room shone out upon the earthly bourne of all such travellers, and the mound above the ashes and the dust that once was he, without whom I had never been.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Or was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting bourne?

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Her plans required all her time and attention, she said; she was about to depart for some unknown bourne; and all day long she stayed in her own room, her door bolted within, filling trunks, emptying drawers, burning papers, and holding no communication with any one.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I thought sometimes I saw beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah; and now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit triumphantly towards the bourne: but I could not reach it, even in fancy—a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually drove me back.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

On a dark, misty, raw morning in January, I had left a hostile roof with a desperate and embittered heart—a sense of outlawry and almost of reprobation—to seek the chilly harbourage of Lowood: that bourne so far away and unexplored.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)