working horse

Noun

working horse (plural working horses)

1. (figuratively, non-native speakers' English) Synonym of workhorse (“someone or something that does a lot of work”).
   • Since the introduction of ultrasound in cardiology in the mid fifties, echocar­diography has continued to grow and has finally become, in particular after the introduction of Doppler modalities, the working horse of the cardiologist.1990, C.A. Visser, “Foreword”, in J.P.M. Hamer, Practical Echocardiography in the Adult: with Doppler and Color-Doppler Flow Imaging, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, →DOI, →ISBN, page x
   • Density functional theory (DFT)¹ is the main working horse for material simulations, especially for ground-state properties such as atomic structures and binding energies.2016 April 26, Jie Ma, Lin-Wang Wang, “Using Wannier functions to improve solid band gap predictions in density functional theory”, in Scientific Reports, volume 6, →DOI, article 24924, page 1

   Synonyms:

   workhorse