CHAPERON, CHAPERONNE, or CHAPERON, properly signifies a sort of hood or covering for the head, anciently worn both by men and women, the nobles and the populace, and afterwards appropriated to the doctors and licentiates in colleges, &c. Hence the name passed to certain little shields, and other funeral devices, placed on the foreheads of the horses that drew the heres in pompous funerals, and which are still called chaperoons or shafferoons; because such devices were originally fastened on the chaperonnes, or hoods, worn by those horses with their other coverings of state.