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Glite Dictionary
trotting horse

trotting horse

4.4
A horse trained to pull a small cart in races while moving with a steady fast step
  • noun
translation icon : caballo trotador
  • I watched as the trotting horse effortlessly pulled the cart down the country road.

Examples

  • He told Paul about Eadweard Muybridge, an Englishman commissioned to take scores of pictures of a favorite trotting horse owned by the former governor of California, Leland Stanford.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • The jockey skillfully guided the trotting horse around the track during the harness race.

  • At the fair, we saw a beautiful trotting horse that was competing in a speed event.

Synonyms

trotter
vstrotting horse
  • Jargon
1 7.7

A horse trained to pull a small cart in races while moving at a steady pace

has identical meaning but is the more descriptive two-word form
harness horse
vstrotting horse
6.9

A horse trained to pull a cart or carriage

is narrower, naming horses trained for a racing gait while pulling vehicles

How Fast

racehorse
35 2.2
trotting horse
4.4
riding horse
1 2.3
packhorse
2 6.8

Surface Forms

trotting horse singular
trotting horses plural

Morphology

trot + horse

The meaning 'a horse that trots' is directly and compositionally derived from the headwords 'trot' + 'horse' with the participle '-ing' indicating the horse's gait; a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer this. The additional specification about training or harness racing is a predictable domain-specific extension, not an idiomatic shift, so the phrase remains transparent.

Etymology

The noun trotting horse comes from the even step called the trot, because people trained horses to keep that pace, 'to trot', while pulling a small cart in early races. So a trotting horse today means a horse trained to move at a trot for harness racing.