horses

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of horse.

   The farm keeps a dozen horses in the back pasture.

   Wild horses roamed the open plains for centuries.

   Note

   A regular plural whose spoken ending adds a syllable, /ɪz/, after the hissing sound that closes horse. It counts the animals, the wider equid family, and chess knights alike. Cavalry is the exception to watch. In that military sense the word works as an uncountable noun, so the singular horse stands for the whole body of mounted soldiers.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of horse.

   The new intern horses around whenever the supervisor steps out.

   Her younger brother horses around at the dinner table every night.

   Note

   It shares its spelling with the plural noun, but here it is a verb that takes a he, she or it subject. Most often it heads the phrasal verb horse around. With a direct object its meaning shifts: someone who horses a coach supplies its animals, and someone who horses a wall sits astride it. With neither around nor an object, it simply means fooling about.

3. 3
   nounslangcountable

   An informal term for horsepower, the unit that measures an engine's power output.

   The sports car boasts nearly five hundred horses.

   The mechanics bragged about how many horses the rebuilt motor could deliver.

   Similarhorsepower

   Note

   Car talk turns the engineering unit back into the animal it was named for. An engine is said to have so many horses, almost always with a number in front. Lou Gramm and Al Greenwood's "Rev on the Red Line" (1979) boasts of a car with horses in the hundreds, and The X-Files episode "Blood" (1994) uses it to read out a diagnostic. Keep it for speech and casual writing, and say horsepower anywhere formal.

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