Word.ws English Dictionary

work horse

work horse is the alternative form of workhorse.

Meaning of workhorse

Noun

workhorse (plural workhorses)

  1. A horse used primarily for manual labor; a draft/draught horse.
  2. (broadly, figuratively) A person or piece of equipment that performs a lot of work, especially one heavily relied upon to perform consistently and regularly.
    • Those old machines are not very glamorous, but even 20 years after their introduction, they are still the workhorses of the industry.

Forms of work horse

pluralwork horses

Questions about work horse

What is work horse the alternative form of?
Work horse is the alternative form of workhorse.

Words near work horse in the dictionary

  1. work groups
  2. work hardening
  3. work hardenings
  4. work histories
  5. work history
  6. work horse
  7. work horses
  8. work house
  9. work houses
  10. work husband
  11. work husbands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: work horse (page history and authors); workhorse (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: “work horse.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/work_horse. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.