Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
one-horse \one"-horse`\, a.
Drawn by one horse; having but a single horse; as, a one-horse carriage.
Second-rate; inferior; small; as, a one-horse town.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"small-scale, petty" 1853, American English, colloquial, in reference to towns so small they only had one horse.
WordNet
Usage examples of "one-horse".
Most of them risked so much by leaving good jobs with much larger variety chains to join up with a one-horse outfit run by an overactive dreamer down in Bentonvillepeople like Clarence Leis, Willard Walker, Charlie Baum, Ron Loveless, Bob Bogle, Claude Harris, Ferold Arend, Charlie Cate, Al Miles, Thomas Jefferson, Gary Reinboth.
Presently a one-horsed, two-wheeled vehicle known as an ekka arrived with four more troopers, who joined the first party, straightening their tunics but not seeming to have anything to say.
Eyes wide and turbulent, Aurelie watched her inamorato enter the little one-horse carriage.
I made up my mind at once, got a light one-horse sleigh up in the village, rigged it with all my bear-skins, good store of whiskey, eatables, and so forth, saddled the gray with my best Somerset, holsters and surcingle attached, and made one of the party on the instant.
Chicago, of course, but it had arranged for trackage rights over a number of other one-horse railroads for its Special Excursions.
Through the sweltering summer, Adams never missed a day in the Senate, rolling in each morning from Richmond Hill in a one-horse chaise, not the fine carriage portrayed in hostile newspaper accounts.
He was experimenting with autogiros, and he had a little one-horse factory near Walton where he was building them.
The feature which pleased me most was the number of small one-horse vehicles which transport the traveller rapidly from one point to another, at a very slight expense, and will even undertake a two or three days' journey.
The commandership of the new, enlarged division wasn't the one-horse race his superintendent blithely imagined.
CORTEZ, PIZARRO, and WALKER were one-horse fillibusters--COLUMBUS was a four-horse team fillibuster, and a large yaller dog under the waggin.
Eisenhart was sitting on the seat of a one-horse fly, shor'boots propped on the splashboard, looking moodily off toward Callahan's church.
The cab, a common one-horse fly, was overturned nearby, its dull black-lacquered panels stitched with bullet-holes.
As I rode towards Kilcullen, I saw a crowd of the peasant-people assembled round a one-horse chair, and my friend in green, as I thought, making off half a mile up the hill.
At six o’clock every morning, Willie Maherty’s one-horse dray would clatter off on its round of the farms to collect the churns from the previous day’s milkings before the day warmed.
One morning, when we was pretty well down the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight of a little one-horse town in a big bend.