1785. Grose, Vulg. Tongue, s.v.
1827. Lytton, Pelham, ch. lxxxii. The cove … is as pretty a Tyburn blossom as ever was brought up to ride a horse foaled by an acorn.
1839. Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard [1889], p. 8. … As to this little fellow … he shall never mount a horse foaled by an acorn, if I can help it.
2. (military).—The triangles or crossed halberds under which soldiers were flogged.
Old- (or Salt-) Horse, subs. (nautical). Salt beef. Also Junk and Salt-junk.
1889. Chambers’s Journal, 3 Aug., 495. Mr. Clark Russell declares that salt-horse works out of the pores, and contributes to that mahogany complexion common to sailors, which is often mistakenly attributed to rum and weather.
One-horse, adj. (American). Comparatively small, insignificant, or unimportant.
1858. Washington Evening Star. On Friday last, the engineer of a fast train was arrested by the authorities of a one-horse town in Dauphin County, Pa., for running through the borough at a greater rate of speed than is allowed by their ordinances.
1871. De Vere, Americanisms, p. 221. The indignant settler who has been ill-treated, as he fancies, in court, denounces his attorney as a ‘miserable, one-horse lawyer;’ and the Yankee newly arrived in England does not hesitate to declare that ‘Liverpool is a poor one-horse kind of a place,’ a term applied by Mark Twain to no less a city than Rome itself; and a witty clergyman of Boston inveighed once bitterly against ‘timid, sneaking, one-horse oaths, as infinitely worse than a good, round, thundering outburst.’
1891. National Review, Sep., p. 127. Mr. Marion Crawford’s Witch of Prague (Macmillan & Co.) is, as his compatriots would say, rather a one-horse witch.