Sorry, no "alicorn"

[eve_prime]

J. was telling me that an alicorn is a winged unicorn, a cross between a unicorn and a pegasus. There are websites where people used the term. I wondered how authentic this is -- was this a real mythological creature that I'd just missed out on, or a modern invention? So today I looked it up. The OED (the definitive dictionary of our language) had no "alicorn" but said that the French had corrupted the word "unicorn" to "licorne" with the same meaning. Nor was "alicorn" in a reference dictionary of mythical beasts, nor one of monsters, nor in the standard multi-volume dictionaries of folklore. So anyway, digging further on the web, this page seems authoritative: "Alicorn" was given the meaning "horn of a unicorn" by the author of a 1930 book on unicorns, and the unicorn-pegasus hybrid was created by fantasy-genre illustrators in the late twentieth century.