Ever since the running of the 143rd Kentucky Derby last week, been wondering how variants of horses fared in my data collections, aside from an earlier post I wrote on variants of male horses that were provided by informants of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. With that being said, I turned my sights toward the Billboard year-end Top Ten collection, using target search terms such as horse, pony, colt, and bronco.

In all, the search on the 660 songs in the collection resulted in 17 hits in 8 songs, including what appear to be literal references to real-life horses and figurative references, such as dark horse. Of the five variants, the most frequent was horse(s), which appeared nine times in four songs, and included the compounds wild horses and dark horse, as in the songs featured below:

The remaining four variants occurred in only one song each, with only one variant, pony, appearing more than once in the respective song.

The final three variants, colt, stallion, and Mustang, are all used figuratively, in a sense, with the first two being applied to people and the latter to a car model.

Donate