Word.ws English Dictionary

dead horse

dead horse noun: the period of work on board ship for which the seamen have been paid in advance (usually a month's wages), the end of this term being celebrated by parading a straw horse about the decks.

Noun

dead horse (usually uncountable, plural dead horses)

  1. (dated, usually) The period of work on board ship for which the seamen have been paid in advance (usually a month's wages), the end of this term being celebrated by parading a straw horse about the decks.
  2. (Australia, slang, usually) Tomato sauce.

Forms of dead horse

pluraldead horses

Questions about dead horse

What does dead horse mean?
Dead horse means the period of work on board ship for which the seamen have been paid in advance (usually a month's wages), the end of this term being celebrated by parading a straw horse about the decks.
What part of speech is dead horse?
Dead horse is a noun.
What is the plural of dead horse?
The plural of dead horse is dead horses.

Words near dead horse in the dictionary

  1. Dead heads
  2. dead heat
  3. dead heats
  4. dead hedge
  5. dead hedges
  6. dead horse
  7. dead horses
  8. dead house
  9. dead houses
  10. dead ice
  11. dead in the train

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 dead horse.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dead horse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_horse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.