Wiktionary

horsepower

See also: horse-power and horse power

English

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Etymology

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From horse +‎ power: the unit was originally defined as the amount of power that a horse could provide.

Both non-metric and metric units of power were derived from effectively identical measurements of the power a draught horse could sustain over several hours, with the difference in watts solely due to different rounding errors to express that power in round numbers in the original non-SI units (ft·lbf/min and kgf⋅m/s respectively).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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horsepower (countable and uncountable, plural horsepowers or horsepower)

  1. (uncountable) Power derived from the motion of a horse.
    • 1971, Gwen White, Antique Toys And Their Background, page 86:
      Shillibeer's bus came in 1829 drawn by three horses. Later two horses were found sufficient to pull these closed wagonettes, which eventually had outside seats, and later on the substitution of a motor for horsepower.
    • 1980, AA Book of British Villages, Drive Publications Ltd, page 150:
      The Sun Inn is an attractive black-and-white building, and has an old mounting block outside as a reminder of the days when horsepower meant four legs and a saddle.
    • 2003, Gavin Weightman, What the Industrial Revolution Did for Us, page 57:
      The wheel was to have been turned by horsepower, but it was adapted to be driven by a mill-wheel on the river Derwent […]
  2. A nonmetric unit of power (symbol hp) with various definitions, for different applications. The most common of them is probably the mechanical horsepower, approximately equal to 745.7 watts.
    • 1955 April, Cecil J. Allen, “British Locomotive Practice and Performance”, in Railway Magazine, page 261:
      Equally I can stand in a station like Lucerne in Switzerland, and watch with ill-concealed admiration the majestic entry of one of the latest Gotthard "Ae 6/6" electrics, packing 6,000 horsepower within its 60 ft. of length and 121 tons of weight, with its sleek dark green sides and handsome stainless steel bands and front wings.
    • 2007 January 24, Sue Callaway, “Jonesing for a Maybach”, in CNN‎[1]:
      As Quincy recovered from our one-block adrenaline burst, I gunned all 700 horsepower once more. Even with the pedal to the metal, the Exelero's sheer bulk caused a multisecond lag from the twin-turbo-charged V12's wind-up to actual launch.
    • 2012 March 22nd, David Blockley, Engineering: A Very Short Introduction (309), Oxford University Press, →ISBN, chapter 2: “The age of gravity – time for work”, page 20:
      In the past, before the widespread adoption of SI units, the work that engines were capable of doing was compared with the work that horses could do – hence the term ‘horsepower’. Various people came up with various equivalencies, but the modern agreed definition is that 1 horsepower is 746 joules per second or 746 watts.
  3. A metric unit (symbol often PS from the German abbreviation), approximately equal to 735.5 watts.
  4. (figurative, uncountable) Strength, performance capability, specs, vel sim.
    political horsepower
    • 2024 May 3, The Linux Cast, 8:35 from the start, in I Need to Apologize... This Device is Bad‎[2]:
      My patron who sent this to me to do a whole video on, you know, Convergence or whatever, being able to use this as a desktop, uh, replacement, or at least a desktop type thing, it’s impossible for me, I can’t do it, this device just doesn’t have that type of horsepower even to run itself, let alone actually run desktop Linux, it just can’t do it, I haven’t figured out how to do it.

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Derived terms

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Translations

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