trotters

Noun

trotter (plural trotters)

1. One who trots.
   • Charlie kept telling himself that Eddie Gillespie was the great runner, while he was just a quick trotter.2013, Stephen Dobyns, Saratoga Bestiary
2. In harness racing, a horse with a gait in which the front and back legs on opposite sides take a step together alternating with the other set of opposite legs; as opposed to a pacer.
   • The Celebrity, by arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at Mohair on a certain afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the track. The three returned wondering and charmed with Mrs. Cooke; they were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious...1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, page 58
3. The foot of a pig, sheep, or other quadruped, especially when prepared as meat.
   • grange cookbook recipes for trotters
4. (slang) A person's foot.
   • Then you get up on your trotters, but you have a job to stand; / For the landscape 'round you totters and your collar's full of sand.2004, Charley Hester, Kirby Ross, The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush-popping Cow Waddy, page 27
5. (UK, historical) A tailor's assistant who goes around to receive orders.
   • One of these proprietors is a magistrate of Oxfordshire, another a justice of the peace for Berkshire, and Stewart, who was a tailor's trotter, originally, was lately high sherriff ^([sic]) of his county.1830, William Cobbett, Eleven Lectures on the French and Belgian Revolutions, page 8

See all 8 meanings of trotter