Word.ws English Dictionary

Trojan-horse

Trojan-horse verb: to introduce slyly, to sneak in, to subvert.

Verb

Trojan-horse (third-person singular simple present Trojan-horses, present participle Trojan-horsing, simple past and past participle Trojan-horsed)

  1. (idiomatic, transitive) To introduce slyly, to sneak in, to subvert.
    • We all know how genius “Kamp Krusty,” “A Streetcar Named Marge,” “Homer The Heretic,” “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie” and “Mr. Plow” are, but even the relatively unheralded episodes offer wall-to-wall laughs and some of the smartest, darkest, and weirdest gags ever Trojan-horsed into a network...2012 May 20, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “Marge Gets A Job” (season 4, episode 7; originally aired 11/05/1992)”, in The Onion AV Club
    • Suddenly he realized that the arguments and social criticism he wanted to assert[…]could live and breathe on their own. He didn’t have to Trojan-horse them into his novels’ characters or plot points anymore.2018 June 26, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Jonathan Franzen Is Fine With All of It”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  2. (transitive, computer security) To install a Trojan horse on (a system).
  3. (transitive, computer security) To install a Trojan horse on the system of (a person or organization).
    • A world writable file or two later, and a customer has been trojan-horsed.1992, UNIX Security Symposium III: Proceedings, USENIX Association, →ISBN, page 146

Forms of Trojan-horse

third-person singular presentTrojan-horses
present participleTrojan-horsing
past participleTrojan-horsed
pastTrojan-horsed

Questions about Trojan-horse

What does Trojan-horse mean?
Trojan-horse means to introduce slyly, to sneak in, to subvert.
What part of speech is Trojan-horse?
Trojan-horse is a verb.
What is the past tense of Trojan-horse?
The past tense of Trojan-horse is Trojan-horsed.

Words near Trojan-horse in the dictionary

  1. Trojan planets
  2. Trojan point
  3. Trojan points
  4. Trojan test
  5. Trojan War
  6. Trojan-horse
  7. Trojan-horsed
  8. Trojan-horses
  9. Trojan-horsing
  10. trojaned
  11. trojaning

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Trojan-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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-Trojan-horse.ogg.

Cite this entry: “Trojan-horse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/trojan-horse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.