horsepower

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See also: horse-power and horse power

English

Etymology

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

Noun

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Wikipedia

horsepower (countable and uncountable, plural horsepowers or horsepower)

  1. (uncountable) Power derived from the motion of a horse.
    • 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.
    • 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. (uncountable) Strength.
    political horsepower

Synonyms

Derived terms

Translations

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