knacker's yard
Britishnoun
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a slaughterhouse for horses
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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.
In the first book she rescues her prize horse, Storm, from a knacker's yard.
From The Guardian • Jul. 27, 2013
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
Under all circumstances, it is advisable to let this dismemberment of dead and fallen cattle he performed at the knacker's yard.
From On the cattle plague: or, Contagious typhus in horned cattle. Its history, origin, description, and treatment by Bourguignon, Honor?
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.
