- 1主力、任勞任怨的骨幹（人）；耐操耐用的機器（物）
Literally, a workhorse is a horse kept for pulling and carrying rather than for racing or riding for pleasure — a strong, plain, patient animal. Almost all modern use is figurative, and it keeps every one of those qualities. A workhorse is the person, machine, or vehicle that does the steady, heavy, unglamorous work day after day without breaking down and without being noticed. An old delivery van that has run 400,000 is the workhorse of the fleet; a plain reliable engine is the workhorse of the range; the quiet colleague who handles all the boring cases is the workhorse of the team. The word is genuinely respectful — it praises reliability and endurance. But it does have a small shadow: workhorses are not admired for beauty or brilliance, and calling a person a workhorse can quietly mean "not the star." People often set it against words like , star, or thoroughbred. It is a common, plain word, at home in news, business, and everyday talk, and often used as workhorse of the ___.
組成work + horse — a horse kept for work. The compound goes back to Middle English werkehorse.
同家族的字
- packhorsepack + horse, another horse-named-for-its-job compound
- workhousework + house, the same work in a compound naming where work is done
- horsepowerhorse + power, another word measuring things by what a horse can do
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
workhorsenoun/ˈwɜːkˌhɔːs/
- 1
A horse used primarily for manual labor; a draft/draught horse.
- 2
A person or piece of equipment that performs a lot of work, especially one heavily relied upon to perform consistently and regularly.
- Those old machines are not very glamorous, but even 20 years after their introduction, they are still the workhorses of the industry.
- Captain Harry Kane was the workhorse and creator, while Sterling and Rashford provided the finishing flourishes that put England in dreamland at the interval.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。