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horseless carriage

noun

Etymology

Early term for an automobile, at the time it was common that carriages were pulled by animals, typically horses, but the automobiles were not.

Definitions

  1. An early automobile, of the types designed before World War I.

    • Fanny Minafer had begun to talk to Lucy. "Your father wanted to prove that his horseless carriage would run, even in the snow," she said. "It really does, too."

  2. Something new and unprecedented interpreted in older and familiar terms.

    • horseless carriage thinking
    • The basic operational mechanisms and business practices were so new and strange, so utterly sui generis, that all we could see was a gaggle of “innovative” horseless carriages.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for horseless carriage. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA