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wild horse

wild horse

18 2.7
A horse that lives in nature and is not tame
  • noun
  • /waɪld hɔrs/
translation icon : caballo salvaje
  • In the time when the wild horses ran free.
  • wild horses and burros
  • wild horses roam
  • herd of wild horses

Examples

  • And now the government is rounding up our wild horses, and they plan to shoot them, too, before the first snows.

  • So what happened to the wild horses Davis purchased from the BLM?

    Blog text (15)
  • All those things take wild horses off the range to make way for progress.

    Blog text (15)
  • We raise some cows and catch some wild horses to make a living.

  • There are now more wild horses living in captivity than in the wild.

    Blog text (15)
  • The marsh became meadow; wild horses ran into the thunder of their song.

    Fiction book (1994)
  • I pay taxes for federal lands -- for federally protected wild horses and burros to live on.

    Blog text (15)
  • Typical animals hunted by Lucy would have been wild horses, woolly mammoths, reindeer, and rhinos.

    Academic text (1999)
  • On a trip through the desert, we spotted a group of wild horses running majestically across the plains.

  • The documentary showcased the life of wild horses and their struggle to survive in harsh conditions.

Synonyms

mustang
vswild horse
  • US
77 5.8

A small wild horse that roams the western plains of North America

is a general term for any undomesticated or feral horse
bronco
vswild horse
  • US
11 8.0

A wild or partly tamed horse used in rodeos

is broader covering any undomesticated or feral horse rather than rodeo types

How Tame

domesticated animal
  • Specialized
2 1.1
bronc
  • Slang
6 9.3
wild horse
18 2.7

Surface Forms

wild horse singular
wild horses plural

Morphology

wild + horse

The meaning 'a horse that lives in the wild / not domesticated' is directly and compositionally derived from 'wild' (not tamed) + 'horse' (the animal). This straightforward adjective+noun combination is cross-linguistically common and should be immediately comprehensible to a B1 learner who knows both words.

Etymology

Wild horse comes from the simple image of a horse that is wild, roaming open land in herds and not kept by people. So, wild horse means 'a horse that lives free and is not tamed'.