Dictionary

horseless carriage en · 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.

Meanings

1. (historical) An early automobile, of the types designed before World War I.
   • The movement for the introduction of horseless carriages is represented by two periodicals, the Horseless Age and the Motocycle, in the United States; the Autocar, in London; and La Locomotion Automobile and La France Automobile, in France. 1896 August, Popular Science Monthly, volume 49:
   • 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." 1918, Booth Tarkington, chapter VIII, in The Magnificent Ambersons, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC:
2. (figuratively) 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. 2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 11, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:

Forms

Relateds

buggy whip

Synonyms

Brass Era car

Translations (2)

pl powóz bezkonny (early automobile) · de Benzinkutsche (early automobile)

wikipedia: London Steam Carriage