Definition of "bourn" [bourn]

• A small stream; a brook. (noun)
• Archaic A destination; a goal. (noun)
• Archaic A boundary; a limit. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "There's really only one period in a life, the full stop, "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," as Shakespeare put it."
• "What no science fiction writer before the moonshot anticipated was that the Space Race would start out as a contest between two military powers for ascendancy in the 'high ground' of outer space, which then devolved into a prestige project, whose prohibitive costs were bourn for such imponderable goals such as national bragging rights."
• "Researchers study the diving behavior of auks using miniature bird-bourn electronic data-loggers called time-depth recorders (TDRs)."