trotter

From Middle English trottere, equivalent to trot +‎ -er.

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• Rhymes: -ɒtə(ɹ)

trotter (plural trotters)

1. One who trots.
   • 2013, Stephen Dobyns, Saratoga Bestiary:

     Charlie kept telling himself that Eddie Gillespie was the great runner, while he was just a quick trotter.

   • 2013 October 22, D. Ter Haar, Collected Papers of P.L. Kapitza: Volume 3‎, volume 3, Elsevier, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 174:

     ... empiricism “A lame cripple going along the right road can overtake a trotter if the latter is running along the wrong road. Moreover, the faster the trotter runs, once having lost the path, the further he lags behind the cripple”. […]

2. In harness racing, a horse with a gait in which the front and back legs on opposite sides take a step together alternating with the other set of opposite legs; as opposed to a pacer.
   • 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, page 58:

     The Celebrity, by arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at Mohair on a certain afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the track. The three returned wondering and charmed with Mrs. Cooke; they were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious house.

3. The foot of a pig, sheep, or other quadruped, especially when prepared as meat.

   Hyponym: crubeen

   grange cookbook recipes for trotters

   • 1943 November – 1944 February (date written; published 1945 August 17), George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VI, in Animal Farm […], London: Secker & Warburg, published May 1962, →OCLC, page 51:

     Finally Napoleon raised his trotter for silence and announced that he had already made all the arrangements.

4. (slang) A person's foot.
   • 2004, Charley Hester, Kirby Ross, The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush-popping Cow Waddy, page 27:

     Then you get up on your trotters, but you have a job to stand; / For the landscape 'round you totters and your collar's full of sand.

5. (UK, historical) A tailor's assistant who goes around to receive orders.
   • 1830, William Cobbett, Eleven Lectures on the French and Belgian Revolutions, page 8:

     One of these proprietors is a magistrate of Oxfordshire, another a justice of the peace for Berkshire, and Stewart, who was a tailor's trotter, originally, was lately high sherriff ^[sic] of his county.

Inherited from Middle French trotter, from Old French trotter, troter (“to go, trot”), borrowed from Medieval Latin *trottāre, *trotāre (“to go”), from Frankish *trottōn (“to go, run”), from Proto-Germanic *trudōną, *trudaną, *tradjaną (“to go, step, tread”), from Proto-Indo-European *dreh₂- (“to run, escape”). Cognates with English trot. More at tread.

• IPA^(key): /tʁɔ.te/

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trotter

1. (usually of a horse) to trot

• trotter dans la tête
• trottiner
• trottoir

• “trotter”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.