Word.ws English Dictionary

buggy whip

buggy whip noun: a horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash, used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage.

Noun

buggy whip (plural buggy whips)

  1. (historical) A horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash, used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage.
    • When his strawberries were beginning to ripen Dry Valley bought the heaviest buggy whip in the Santa Rosa store. He sat for many hours under the live oak tree plaiting and weaving in an extension to its lash.1907, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson”, in Heart of the West, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company for Review of Reviews Co., →OCLC, page 259
    • Rushed to the springboard and the leap, always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed them vigorously.1917, Jack London, Michael, Brother of Jerry
  2. (figuratively) An obsolete product or technology.
    • went the way of the buggy whip
    • Need to describe a hand-held mathematical calculator? Try “buggy whip.” A typewriter? A VCR? They’ve been called buggy whips, too. Even newspapers have received that label. (That one hurts.)[2010 January 9, Randall Stross, “Failing Like a Buggy Whip Maker? Better Check Your Simile”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the...

Examples of buggy whip in a sentence

  • I'm sure somebody somewhere is happily making buggy whips at some level.2012 June 12, Rebecca J. Rosen, quoting Thomas Keane, “Pay Phones: A Technology for the Poor That's About to Get Left Hanging”, in The...
  • “The danger is that in the long run, does this become the buggy whip challenge?” said Mark Wakefield, global automotive market lead at AlixPartners.2025 October 11, Mark Wakefield, quotee, “Carmakers steer back towards more lucrative petrol vehicles”, in FT Weekend (Companies & Markets...

Forms of buggy whip

pluralbuggy whips

Origin of buggy whip

In the twentieth century, after the advent of widespread automobile use and diminished horse use, the buggy whip became a symbol of obsoleted technologies and disrupted business models. Popularized by German-American economist and professor at Harvard Business School Theodore Levitt in 1960.

Questions about buggy whip

What does buggy whip mean?
Buggy whip means a horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash, used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage.
How do you use buggy whip in a sentence?
I'm sure somebody somewhere is happily making buggy whips at some level.
What part of speech is buggy whip?
Buggy whip is a noun.
What is the plural of buggy whip?
The plural of buggy whip is buggy whips.

Words near buggy whip in the dictionary

  1. Buggins
  2. Buggins's turn
  3. buggish
  4. Buggs
  5. buggy
  6. buggy whip
  7. buggy whips
  8. buggyman
  9. buggymen
  10. Bughea de Jos
  11. Bughea de Sus

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: buggy whip (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “buggy whip.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/buggy_whip. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.