one-horse town
one-horse town noun: a very small town, especially one of a rural nature and offering very few or no attractions.
Noun
one-horse town (plural one-horse towns)
- A very small town, especially one of a rural nature and offering very few or no attractions.
- It's surrounded by beautiful wilderness, but otherwise it's just a one-horse town.
- The journey took 48 hours with a stopover in a Bates-style motel in the one-horse town of Marblemount – the last services for 70 wild miles of boscage and bears.2021 February 16, Dan Richards, “Peak cabin: a fire-spotter's lonely vantage point in Washington state”, in The Guardian
- Synonyms:
- jerkwater town, one-blink town, Podunk, Isolated town, bump in the road, jerkwater, jerk-water, wide spot in the road, Isolated place, arse end of nowhere
Synonyms of one-horse town
- jerkwater town
- one-blink town
- Podunk
- Isolated town
- bump in the road
- jerkwater
- jerk-water
- wide spot in the road
- Isolated place
- arse end of nowhere
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
- back of beyond
- back forty
- backcountry
- backwater
- backwoods
- provinces
- beyond the black stump
- boondock
- boondocks
- boonies
- bumfuck nowhere
- dullsville
- edge of the earth
- edge of the world
- ends of the earth
- ends of the world
- hinterland
- middle of nowhere
- north forty
- off the beaten track
- out of the way
- sticks
- the sticks
- Actual places
- back o' Bourke
- Outer Mongolia
- Timbuktu
- Tuktoyaktuk
- Fictional places
- Anytown
Forms of one-horse town
| plural | one-horse towns |
|---|
Origin of one-horse town
The term “one-horse” originated as an agricultural phrase, meaning to be drawn or worked by a single horse. This led to the use of this phrase in a metaphorical sense as something that is small or insignificant. Charles Dickens explained in his publication All the Year Round (1871): ‘One horse’ is an agricultural phrase, applied to anything small or insignificant, or to any inconsiderable or contemptible person: as a ‘one-horse town,’ a ‘one-horse bank,’ a ‘one-horse hotel,’ a ‘one-horse lawyer’, etc.
Questions about one-horse town
- What does one-horse town mean?
- One-horse town means a very small town, especially one of a rural nature and offering very few or no attractions.
- What part of speech is one-horse town?
- One-horse town is a noun.
- What is the plural of one-horse town?
- The plural of one-horse town is one-horse towns.
Words near one-horse town in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: one-horse town (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-one-horse town.ogg.
Cite this entry: “one-horse town.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one-horse_town. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.