Meaning
Literally, a horse kept for heavy labour such as ploughing and hauling, as opposed to riding, driving or racing; figuratively, a person, athlete, vehicle or machine that is unglamorous but dependably performs large amounts of hard work over long periods, as in 'the workhorse of the fleet' or 'the team's workhorse midfielder'. Frequently contrasted with showhorse. Today applied at least as often to machines, vehicles, aircraft and athletes as to workers. The open two-word form work horse is an accepted alternative spelling. Regional use: English generally; British and American use since the Middle English period.
Origin
Not named after any famous animal: workhorse is a plain compound of work plus horse. The OED traces it to the Middle English period, with earliest evidence from 1463, in the writing of J. Cok, and Wiktionary records the Middle English form werkehorse. Merriam-Webster agrees on the fifteenth century for the literal sense, 'a horse used chiefly for labor as distinguished from driving, riding, or racing', and defines the figurative senses as a person who performs most of the work of a group task and, by extension, a hardworking person or a dependable machine. No dated first use for the figurative sense appears in the consulted public sources; the transferred sense for people, machines and athletes is a twentieth-century growth of the literal compound.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- the old workhorse
- workhorses
Usage Examples
- The old pickup was the workhorse of the farm, hauling feed through every season for twenty years.
- She was the workhorse of the legal department, quietly billing more hours than anyone else on the team.
- Those cargo planes are slow and ugly, but they remain the workhorses of every humanitarian airlift.