The unicorn is a legendary creature embodied like a horse, but slender and with a single — usually spiral — horn growing out of its forehead (whence its name—cornum being Latin for 'horn').
Though the popular image of the unicorn is that of a white horse differing only in the horn, the traditional unicorn has a billy- goat beard, a lion's tail, and cloven hoofs, which distinguish him from a horse. Interestingly, these modifications make the horned ungulate more realistic, since only cloven-hoofed animals have horns. Marianna Mayer has observed (The Unicorn and the Lake), "The unicorn is the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. He could be captured only by unfair means, and his single horn was said to neutralize poison."
In medieval lore, the alicorn is the spiraled horn of the unicorn and is said to be able to heal and neutralize poisons. This is derived from Ctesias's reports on the unicorn in India, where it was used by the rulers of that place for anti-toxin purposes so as to avoid assassination.
Though qilin (麒麟, Chinese), a creature in Chinese myth that is sometimes called "the Chinese unicorn", is a hybrid animal of the imagination no more unicorn than it is chimera, with the body of a deer, the head of a lion, green scales and a long forwardly-curved horn. "Kirin", in Japan, written with the same Chinese ideograms, though based on the Chinese animal, is usually portrayed as more closely resembling the Western unicorn than the Chinese qilin.
