dandy-horse
dandy-horse noun: a two-wheeled foot-propelled vehicle with no pedals or brakes; a draisienne.
Noun
dandy-horse (plural dandy-horses)
- A two-wheeled foot-propelled vehicle with no pedals or brakes; a draisienne.
- In 1817 and in 1818, France and Germany both claimed they had come up with the first mechanism for a bike. It was a piece of wood with a wheel at one end and a wheel at the other, and you walked it along. In England, they called it a dandy horse.1998 November 29, Eric Epstein, “A Passion for Old Bicycles Spun Into a Museum”, in New York Times, retrieved 31 May 2014
- Because these riders preferred smooth pavements to rough roads, they tended to travel on pavements and on park footpaths, where inevitable collisions with pedestrians resulted in such practices being outlawed. The dandy horse went out of fashion nearly as quickly as it came in.2015, Chris Boardman, The Biography of the Modern Bike: The Ultimate History of Bike Design, Hachette, →ISBN, page 10
- Synonyms:
- hobby horse, draisienne
Synonyms of dandy-horse
Forms of dandy-horse
| plural | dandy-horses |
|---|---|
| alternative form | dandy horse |
Questions about dandy-horse
- What does dandy-horse mean?
- Dandy-horse means a two-wheeled foot-propelled vehicle with no pedals or brakes; a draisienne.
- What part of speech is dandy-horse?
- Dandy-horse is a noun.
- What is the plural of dandy-horse?
- The plural of dandy-horse is dandy-horses.
Words near dandy-horse in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: dandy-horse (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.
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Cite this entry: “dandy-horse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dandy-horse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.