horse around

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

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Verb

horse around (third-person singular simple present horses around, present participle horsing around, simple past and past participle horsed around)

1. (intransitive, idiomatic) To fiddle or play; to clown; to do nothing of consequence or importance.

   Can we quit horsing around and get some work done?

   Stop horsing around with the controls, before you break something.

   • 2014 June 26, A. A. Dowd, “Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler Spoof Rom-com Clichés in They Came Together”, in The A.V. Club‎^[1], archived from the original on 7 December 2017:

     As Norah Jones coos sweet nothings on the soundtrack, the happy couple—played by Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler—canoodle through a Manhattan montage, making pasta for two, swimming through a pile of autumn leaves, and horsing around at a fruit stand.

   • 2015 January 14, Catherine O'Flynn, “10:04 by Ben Lerner review”, in The Guardian‎^[2]:

     A novel about writing a novel; a narrator who is and is not the author; general metafictional horsing around reflecting both the author’s and reader’s ambivalence about the novel.

   • 1989, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (script)

     "Genghis Khan! Abe Lincoln! That’s funny until someone gets hurt."
     But Genghis Khan and Lincoln keep horsing around.

   • 1943, Ted W. Lawson, Bob Considine, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo:

     I told him that if I passed out before we got to a hospital I wanted him to see to it that no quack horsed around with my leg.

Synonyms

• (behave clownishly, idly): fool around, act out, clown around, goof off, muck about, muck around, muck up (Australia), yuk it up (US)

See also

• horseplay