# horsepower
## English
### Etymology

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

* (General American) enPR: hôrsʹpou'ər, IPA: /ˈhɔɹsˌpaʊɚ/
* (Received Pronunciation) enPR: hôsʹpou'ə, IPA: /ˈhɔːsˌpaʊə/
* Audio (US):(file)
* Hyphenation: horse‧power

### Noun

horsepower (countable and uncountable, plural horsepowers or horsepower)
* (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 […]
* 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.
** 2007 January 24, Sue Callaway, “Jonesing for a Maybach”, in CNN‎: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.
* A metric unit (symbol often PS from the German abbreviation), approximately equal to 735.5 watts.
* (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: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.

#### Synonyms

* hp

#### Derived terms

* brake horsepower
* equivalent shaft horsepower
* horsepower-hour
* hydraulic horsepower
* mechanical horsepower
* shaft horsepower
* thermal horsepower

#### Translations

    The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

### Anagrams

* shorepower