coach horse
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of coach horse
First recorded in 1580–90
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Anderson is like the family coach horse," Novelist William Faulkner once said; "He's dependable, you can trust him to take the children to Sunday school safely.
From Time Magazine Archive
Those that uses to be where the buffes be are not so bigg, but about the bignesse of a coach horse.
From Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson by Radisson, Pierre Esprit
A hackney coach horse turned into a field of grass, falls not more eagerly to a breakfast which lasts the whole day, than I attacked the old folios, so respectably covered with dust.
From Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey by Cottle, Joseph
There's some awful mystery in this young woman," muttered Mr Clam, puffing like a broken-winded coach horse, "and if I live I'll find it out.
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 327, January, 1843 by Various
He was, however, well mounted on a coach horse of Mr. Wharton's and, clinging to the back of the animal with instinctive skill, he abandoned the rein to the beast.
From The Spy by Cooper, James Fenimore
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
