hackney

From Middle English hakeney; probably from Hackney (formerly a town, now a borough of London), used for grazing horses before sale, or from Old French haquenee (“ambling mare for ladies”), Latinized in England to hakeneius (though some recent French sources report that the English usage predates the French).

• IPA^(key): /ˈhækni/

• Audio (southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ækni

hackney (countable and uncountable, plural hackneys)

1. (archaic) An ordinary horse.
2. A carriage for hire or a cab.
   • 1838 (date written)​, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XIV, in Lady Anne Granard; or, Keeping up Appearances. […], volume I, London: Henry Colburn, […], published 1842, OCLC 1000392275, page 186:

     "Mamma would die if she knew. The boy," replied Georgiana, "walked with us to Oxford Street, and we took a hackney-coach. Will Mrs. Gooch ever forgive us for getting out of it at her door?"

3. A horse used to ride or drive.
4. A breed of English horse.
5. (archaic) A hired drudge; a hireling; a prostitute.
6. (archaic, uncountable) Inferior writing; literary hackwork.
   • quoted in 1972, Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (page 384)

     Not that the existence of Grub street is to be doubted: it was, indeed, a grim actuality, and many a garreter realised by experience
     How unhappy's the fate
     To live by one's pate
     And to be forced to write hackney for bread.

hackney (not comparable)

1. Offered for hire.

   hackney coaches

2. (figuratively) Much used; trite; mean.

   hackney authors

   • a. 1685, Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon, The Ghost of the old House of Commons to the new one appointed to meet at Oxford.

     his accumulative and hackney tongue

hackney (third-person singular simple present hackneys, present participle hackneying, simple past and past participle hackneyed)

1. (transitive) To make uninteresting or trite by frequent use.
2. (transitive) To use as a hackney.
3. (transitive) To carry in a hackney coach.
   • 1785, William Cowper, The Task

     […] To her, who, frugal only that her thrift / May feed excesses she can ill afford, / Is hackneyed home unlackeyed; […]