one-horse lawyer
one-horse lawyer noun: a lawyer who has only worked in a small town, lacking the experience and sophistication of more prominent lawyers.
Noun
one-horse lawyer (plural one-horse lawyers)
- A lawyer who has only worked in a small town, lacking the experience and sophistication of more prominent lawyers.
- The two chatted about several matters, and then the visitor commented, "Mr. Lincoln, if anybody had told me that in a general crisis like this the people were going out to a little one-horse town to pick out a one-horse lawyer for President, I wouldn't have believed it."1998, Gene Griessman, B. Eugene Griessman, Abraham Lincoln, The Words Lincoln Lived By, page 53
- I was a one horse lawyer in this one horse town.2007, Bert S. Lang, A Divine Sneeze, page 89
Forms of one-horse lawyer
| plural | one-horse lawyers |
|---|
Origin of one-horse lawyer
From the agricultural phrase one-horse meaning 'to be drawn/worked by a single horse.' This led to "one-horse" being expanded to mean anything small or contemptible.
Questions about one-horse lawyer
- What does one-horse lawyer mean?
- One-horse lawyer means a lawyer who has only worked in a small town, lacking the experience and sophistication of more prominent lawyers.
- What part of speech is one-horse lawyer?
- One-horse lawyer is a noun.
- What is the plural of one-horse lawyer?
- The plural of one-horse lawyer is one-horse lawyers.
Words near one-horse lawyer in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: one-horse lawyer (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 lawyer.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one-horse_lawyer. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.