"one-trick pony" meaning in English

See one-trick pony in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: one-trick pony [singular], one-trick ponies [plural]
Head templates: {{noun|2=one-trick ponies}} [POS TABLE]
  1. An animal in a performance (like a circus) who only knows how to do one trick.
    Someone who has only one thing that they're good at, or someone who is well-known for one thing and one thing only.     Synonyms: one-hit wonder, master of one
    Sense id: simple-one-trick_pony-en-noun-Zh~x2YjY
     
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "one-trick pony",
      "tags": [
        "singular"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "one-trick ponies",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "2": "one-trick ponies"
      },
      "expansion": "[POS TABLE]",
      "name": "noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [],
      "glosses": [
        "An animal in a performance (like a circus) who only knows how to do one trick.",
        "Someone who has only one thing that they're good at, or someone who is well-known for one thing and one thing only."
      ],
      "id": "simple-one-trick_pony-en-noun-Zh~x2YjY",
      "raw_tags": [
        "countable",
        "idiomatic",
        "by extension"
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "one-hit wonder"
        },
        {
          "word": "master of one"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "one-trick pony"
}

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "one-trick pony",
      "tags": [
        "singular"
      ]
    },
    {
      "form": "one-trick ponies",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "2": "one-trick ponies"
      },
      "expansion": "[POS TABLE]",
      "name": "noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "Countable nouns"
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "An animal in a performance (like a circus) who only knows how to do one trick.",
        "Someone who has only one thing that they're good at, or someone who is well-known for one thing and one thing only."
      ],
      "raw_tags": [
        "countable",
        "idiomatic",
        "by extension"
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "one-hit wonder"
        },
        {
          "word": "master of one"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "one-trick pony"
}

Download raw JSONL data for one-trick pony meaning in English (0.7kB)

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-04-29 from the simplewiktionary dump dated 2025-04-20 using wiktextract (4eaa824 and ea19a0a). 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.