See willing horse on Wiktionary
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"ref": "1863 November 10, “Gen. Sherman's Column”, in New York Times, retrieved 2014-02-12:",
"text": "[A]fter a good deal of discussion (some of it angry) among the Major-Generals, it was settled as such things are everywhere—the willing horse (which SHERMAN always is) getting the work to do.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1869, R[ichard] D[oddridge] Blackmore, “FEEDING OF THE PIGS”, in Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. […], volume II, London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, […], →OCLC, pages 57–58:",
"text": "[S]he said to me as quietly as a maiden might ask one to carry a glove, \"Jan Ridd, carr thic^([sic]) thing for me.\" So I carried it for her, without any words; wondering what she was up to next, and whether she had ever heard of being too hard on the willing horse.",
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{
"ref": "1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Down the Oise: To Moy”, in An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC, page 141:",
"text": "Finding us easy in our ways, he […] told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1914, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 10, in A Daughter of the Dons:",
"text": "\"When he hears of it he'll be more anxious than ever to fight.\" / Valencia nodded. \"A spur to a willing horse.\"",
"type": "quote"
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{
"ref": "1999 February 18, Philip D. Delnon, “Education letter: Exhausted, underpaid: and that's a good day”, in The Independent, London, retrieved 2014-02-12:",
"text": "There is certainly the need to reward performance and offer incentives for success, but flogging a willing horse is not the way to do it.",
"type": "quote"
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],
"glosses": [
"One who readily performs hard work or who voluntarily tolerates an adverse situation."
],
"id": "en-willing_horse-en-noun-h2E16cGf",
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"(idiomatic, dated) One who readily performs hard work or who voluntarily tolerates an adverse situation."
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"word": "willing horse"
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"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1869, R[ichard] D[oddridge] Blackmore, “FEEDING OF THE PIGS”, in Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor. […], volume II, London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, […], →OCLC, pages 57–58:",
"text": "[S]he said to me as quietly as a maiden might ask one to carry a glove, \"Jan Ridd, carr thic^([sic]) thing for me.\" So I carried it for her, without any words; wondering what she was up to next, and whether she had ever heard of being too hard on the willing horse.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Down the Oise: To Moy”, in An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC, page 141:",
"text": "Finding us easy in our ways, he […] told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a moment that he had gone too far, and killed a willing horse; his face fell; I am sure he would have refunded if he could only have thought of a decent pretext.",
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"ref": "1914, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 10, in A Daughter of the Dons:",
"text": "\"When he hears of it he'll be more anxious than ever to fight.\" / Valencia nodded. \"A spur to a willing horse.\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1999 February 18, Philip D. Delnon, “Education letter: Exhausted, underpaid: and that's a good day”, in The Independent, London, retrieved 2014-02-12:",
"text": "There is certainly the need to reward performance and offer incentives for success, but flogging a willing horse is not the way to do it.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
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"One who readily performs hard work or who voluntarily tolerates an adverse situation."
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"(idiomatic, dated) One who readily performs hard work or who voluntarily tolerates an adverse situation."
],
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"word": "willing horse"
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Download raw JSONL data for willing horse meaning in All languages combined (3.1kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (e4a2c88 and 4230888). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.