knacker's yard
Britishnoun
-
a slaughterhouse for horses
-
informal destruction because of being beyond all usefulness (esp in the phrase ready for the knacker's yard )
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.
Having saved their historic building from the knacker's yard in 1993, the Horse Hospital is now gearing up to celebrate 20 years of alternative pop-cultural purveyance.
From The Guardian ● Feb. 2, 2013
Photograph: Tom Jenkins The London 2012 chairman, Lord Coe, has claimed that proposed changes to the list of banned substances that would differentiate between recreational and performance-enhancing drugs represent "the morality of the knacker's yard".
From The Guardian ● Jul. 27, 2011
Elizabeth Taylor brought Bagnold's novel about 12-year-old Velvet Brown, who saves a horse from a knacker's yard and trains it for the Grand National to vivid life, but the book is every bit as good.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 21, 2011
But the wide berth has probably only hastened the unfortunate animal's exit to the knacker's yard.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 7, 2010
Late that evening some soldiers came with lifting apparatus and took the ponderous dead beast to the nearest knacker's yard.
From Jena or Sedan? by Franz Beyerlein
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.
