coach horse

American  

noun

1. a horse, usually strong and heavily built, for drawing a coach.

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Etymology

Origin of coach horse

First recorded in 1580–90

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

coach horse

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

I am like the old hackney coach horse, Mr. Weller—or is it Mr. Jingle—tells us of; if the shafts were drawn away I should probably collapse.

From Paul Kelver, a Novel by Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome

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 Joseph Cottle

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

Lady Teazle.—No—I swear I never did that: I deny the butler and the coach horse.

From The Ontario High School Reader by A.E. Marty