buggy whip
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.24 in modern English
24
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash, used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage.
noun
An obsolete product or technology.
Example Sentences
- "When his strawberries were beginning to ripen Dry Valley bought the heaviest buggy whip in the Santa Rosa store. He sat for many hours under the live oak tree plaiting and weaving in an extension to its lash."
- "Rushed to the springboard and the leap, always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed them vigorously."
- "went the way of the buggy whip"
- "Need to describe a hand-held mathematical calculator? Try “buggy whip.” A typewriter? A VCR? They’ve been called buggy whips, too. Even newspapers have received that label. (That one hurts.)"
- "“We're sort of the last guy standing on pay phones,” [Thomas] Keane told USA Today. “I call it my buggy-whip strategy. I'm sure somebody somewhere is happily making buggy whips at some level."
- "“The danger is that in the long run, does this become the buggy whip challenge?” said Mark Wakefield, global automotive market lead at AlixPartners."
Etymology
In the twentieth century, after the advent of widespread automobile use and diminished horse use, the buggy whip became a symbol of obsoleted technologies and disrupted business models. Popularized by German-American economist and professor at Harvard Business School Theodore Levitt in 1960.
Inflected Forms
Phrases
Frequently Paired Words
horseless carriage
see at whip § Hyponyms