Four Horsemen
6
9.9
- noun
- Literature
:
Cuatro Jinetes
- The Four Horsemen symbolize conquest, war, famine, and plague in biblical prophecy.
- Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
But it's one of those four horsemen of the apocalypse that, you know, the book that we're reading talks about John Gottman.
- But it's one of those four horsemen of the apocalypse that, you know, the book that we're reading talks about John Gottman.
Examples
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It's the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were loose in the land.
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They chose the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for a reason.
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The Four Horsemen were assembled before the gates, lined up in the grayness on their nightmare mounts.
Fiction book (1993) -
Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—come to claim his soul.
Fiction book (1993) -
In the book, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse serve as harbingers of the end times.
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Many cultures reference the Four Horsemen to represent catastrophic events in history.
Synonyms
1
9.9
Four riders on horses in the Bible that stand for taking land, war, hunger, and death, warning of great disaster
Surface Forms
Morphology
four + Horsemen
The words 'four' and 'horsemen' transparently yield the literal meaning 'four riders on horses', so a learner who knows the constituents will get the basic descriptive sense. However, the specific cultural/biblical sense referring to the apocalyptic riders and their symbolic roles (conquest, war, famine, pestilence) is a specialized reference that cannot be derived from the parts without prior exposure, so the expression is not fully transparent.
Etymology
Four Horsemen comes from the Bible book of Revelation, where four riders on horses bring conquest, war, famine, and death as signs of the 'end of the world'. Because of that strong image, people now use 'the Four Horsemen' to talk about very large disasters or great danger.