working horse

English

Noun

working horse (plural working horses)

1. (non-native speakers' English, figuratively) Synonym of workhorse (“someone or something that does a lot of work”).
   • 1990, C.A. Visser, “Foreword”, in J.P.M. Hamer, Practical Echocardiography in the Adult: with Doppler and Color-Doppler Flow Imaging, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, →DOI, →ISBN, page x:

     Since the introduction of ultrasound in cardiology in the mid fifties, echocar­diography has continued to grow and has finally become, in particular after the introduction of Doppler modalities, the working horse of the cardiologist.

   • 2016 April 26, Jie Ma, Lin-Wang Wang, “Using Wannier functions to improve solid band gap predictions in density functional theory”, in Scientific Reports, volume 6, →DOI, article 24924, page 1:

     Density functional theory (DFT)¹ is the main working horse for material simulations, especially for ground-state properties such as atomic structures and binding energies.