Word.ws English Dictionary

one-horse

one-horse adjective: drawn or worked by a single horse.

Adjective

one-horse (comparative more one-horse, superlative most one-horse)

  1. Drawn or worked by a single horse.
    • He constructed a one-horse plough for me about two years ago, which only weighs 581b., for planting potatoes.1839, British Farmer's Magazine - Volume 3, page 84
    • Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!1857, James Lord Pierpont, One Horse Open Sleigh (Jingle Bells)
  2. Having no competitor.
  3. (broadly) Small, insignificant.
    • Let us have no one-horse candidate for the Presidency. General Grant is the man.1871, The Catholic Record - Volumes 1-2, page 47
    • A Nestor may reappear as an elderly pedagogue, a Circe as the "Madam" of a one-horse brothel.1922, James Joyce, Ulysses

Examples of one-horse in a sentence

  • Come to the wagon business I may have a pole put in front of that one-horse wagon and hitch em both to it.2013, Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers:
  • The Great Powers never think of us as a one-horse state.2014, James A. Michener, A. Grove Day, Rascals in Paradise, page 132:
  • Going from its one-horse hotel, to the model hotel of Philadelphia, was almost too sudden a change even for my excellent constitution.2016, Fanny Fern, Folly as It Flies, page 112:

Forms of one-horse

comparativemore one-horse
superlativemost one-horse

Words formed from one-horse

Phrases with one-horse

Questions about one-horse

What does one-horse mean?
One-horse means drawn or worked by a single horse.
How do you use one-horse in a sentence?
Come to the wagon business I may have a pole put in front of that one-horse wagon and hitch em both to it.
What part of speech is one-horse?
One-horse is an adjective.

Words near one-horse in the dictionary

  1. one-hitter
  2. one-hitters
  3. one-hitting
  4. one-holer
  5. one-holers
  6. one-horse
  7. one-horse lawyer
  8. one-horse lawyers
  9. one-horse race
  10. one-horse races
  11. one-horse town

Source and license

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