Word.ws English Dictionary

horse pistol

horse pistol noun: a type of large pistol carried on the pommel of a saddle while riding.

Noun

horse pistol (plural horse pistols)

  1. A type of large pistol carried on the pommel of a saddle while riding.
    • Above the chimney were sundry villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and, by way of ornament, three gaudily-painted cainsters disposed along its ledge.1847, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, section I
    • From time to time he pulled the trigger of the horse-pistol; from time to time he rested the butt on his ledge and rammed a charge home.1926, Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up— (Parade's End), Penguin, published 2012, page 559

Forms of horse pistol

pluralhorse pistols

Questions about horse pistol

What does horse pistol mean?
Horse pistol means a type of large pistol carried on the pommel of a saddle while riding.
What part of speech is horse pistol?
Horse pistol is a noun.
What is the plural of horse pistol?
The plural of horse pistol is horse pistols.

Words near horse pistol in the dictionary

  1. horse paste
  2. horse pastes
  3. horse pill
  4. horse pills
  5. horse piss
  6. horse pistol
  7. horse pistols
  8. horse plum
  9. horse power
  10. horse powers
  11. horse puckey

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: horse pistol (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: “horse pistol.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/horse_pistol. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.