Whither the Withers on a Horse?

Equine body parts have some odd names. Cannon, hock, frog, gaskin…who knows the origin of these terms? One of the strangest is “withers,” the term that denotes the high ridge of spinal processes at the lower end of the mane. Who thought up this name, and why is it plural when the horse has only a single feature for the designation?

Dictionaries suggest that the word may be derived from “widar,” twelfth-century Old High German for “against” or “back.” The Old English dialect, with its close ties to the German language, included the term “wither” more than four centuries ago when horses were commonly used as draft animals. “Wither” had a similar meaning to “against,” as in the part of the horse against which the harness collar rests when a horse is pulling a plow or wagon. There’s also some relation to the Middle English word “with,” which also means “against,” as in “Brownie got in a fight with another dog.”

So why do horse owners say “withers” instead of “wither” these days? Still no explanation for that one!