Word.ws English Dictionary

scare the horses

scare the horses verb: to upset public order, decorum, or conventional values.

Verb

scare the horses (third-person singular simple present scares the horses, present participle scaring the horses, simple past and past participle scared the horses)

  1. To upset public order, decorum, or conventional values.
    • Invisible no-makeup makeup. Don't want to scare the horses. Okay, deep breath: the tube.2005, Richard Roeper, Schlock Value
    • The core value of paganism was religious tolerance — a man or woman in ancient Rome was at liberty to offer to offer worship to whatever god or goddess seemed most likely to grant a prayerful request, with or without the assistance of priests and priestesses as long as he or she didn't do it in the...2005, Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods, page 7

Forms of scare the horses

third-person singular presentscares the horses
present participlescaring the horses
past participlescared the horses
pastscared the horses

Origin of scare the horses

Probably a variation of frighten the horses of similar meaning, as in "Does it really matter what these affectionate people do? — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!"

Questions about scare the horses

What does scare the horses mean?
Scare the horses means to upset public order, decorum, or conventional values.
What part of speech is scare the horses?
Scare the horses is a verb.
What is the past tense of scare the horses?
The past tense of scare the horses is scared the horses.

Words near scare the horses in the dictionary

  1. scare tactics
  2. scare the bejeebers out of
  3. scare the daylights out of
  4. scare the hell out of
  5. scare the hoes
  6. scare the horses
  7. scare the life out of
  8. scare the living daylights out of
  9. scare the pants off
  10. scare the shit out of
  11. scare up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scare the horses (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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