GOAT HORN

I love the fact that I've been doing etymological research for long enough to know where this word came from before I even searched it. Capricorn was first used in English circa 1400 CE in Geoffrey Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe​ and was either taken from French capricorne or directly from Latin capricornus, a word that literally means "goat-horned". This makes sense if you consider the symbol for the zodiac. Capricornus combines two words: caper, which meant "goat" (and derives from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction kapros, defined as "buck") and cornus​, which we've seen in cornucopia and unicorn as having meant "horn" (this comes from PIE kerh​, also "horn"). Usage of the word capricorn​ peaked in the mid-eighteenth century and has since been trending downwards.