musth

• must

Borrowed from Urdu مست (mast, “drunk, intoxicated; lustful”), and from its etymon Persian مست (mast, “(adjective) drunk, intoxicated; (literary) in rut; of an elephant: in musth; (noun) drunkard”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *meh₂d- (“to be wet; to become wet”).^[1][2]

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /mʌst/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• Audio (General American):

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• Homophones: mussed, must
• Rhymes: -ʌst

musth (countable and uncountable, plural musths)

2. (also attributive, uncountable) Chiefly preceded by in or on: the state each year during which a male animal (usually a camel or an elephant) exhibits increased aggressiveness and sexual activity due to a high level of testosterone; (countable) an instance of this.

   Hypernyms: heat, rut

   Coordinate terms: estrus, oestrus

   • 1849 October, T. S., “Sporting Scenes in Nepaul”, in Colburn’s United Service Magazine, and Naval and Military Journal, part III, London: H. Hurst, […], →OCLC, page 340:

     The Taroos, or elephant catchers, having marked down a wild herd of 300 or 400 elephants, the following preparations are made. About 200 Taroos collect together, mounted upon elephants, and accompanied by two large "taking elephants," highly fed, and kept always musth, (sensual) and when in that state their ferocity is such, that no one but their keeper dares to approach them. […] The active little Taroos now slide down from their steeds, and under cover of one of the musth elephants, who pushes himself forcibly against the wild one selected from the herd, they, in a most dexterous and daring manner, slip the moosack on to each of the hind legs, which performance occupies about three minutes.

   • 1871, Charles Darwin, “Secondary Sexual Characters of Mammals”, in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. […], volume II, London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, Part II (Sexual Selection), page 240:

     No animal in the world is so dangerous as an elephant in must.

   • 1887, Rudyard Kipling, “[Departmental Ditties] Municipal”, in Departmental Ditties and Barrack-room Ballads (The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling; XXXII), Sussex edition, London: Macmillan and Co., […], published 1938, →OCLC, page 36:

     I couldn't see the driver, and across my mind it rushed / That the Commissariat elephant had suddenly gone musth.

   • 1893, Rudyard Kipling, “My Lord the Elephant”, in Many Inventions, London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 44:

     I have seen men deal with enraged elephants and live; but never was man yet born of woman that met my lord the elephant in his musth and lived to tell of the taming.

   • 1936, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], “Shooting an Elephant”, in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, London: Secker and Warburg, published 1950, →OCLC, pages 2–3:

     Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the 'phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? […] It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone "must". It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of "must" is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped.

   • 1967 May, W. Gurnee Dyer, “Elephant Work in South India: A Traveler’s Account of the Gainful Employment of Elephas maximus”, in James K. Page, Jr., editor, Natural History, volume LXXVI, number 5, New York, N.Y.: American Museum of Natural History, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 42, columns 1–2:

     [T]he first officer told us about the musths. It is common knowledge among handlers that male elephants have periodic fits of madness and that they are extremely obstreperous and dangerous at these times. A male in such a condition is called a musth elephant.

   • 2006, Peter Godwin, “December 2003”, in When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.; Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, published April 2007, →ISBN, page 274:

     At MalaMala we are charged by a bull elephant. The late sun reflecting on the moisture at his temporal gland shows he is in musth, and mad with lust, and we have inadvertently separated him from the breeding cows of his desire.

• musth on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “musth, n.”, in Collins English Dictionary.
• “musth, n.”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

• Muths, Thums, shtum