trotter

plural trotters

1. One who trots.

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

   2013, Stephen Dobyns, Saratoga Bestiary

   1 more example

   ... 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”.[…]

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

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.

   1 more example

   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.

   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

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

   grange cookbook recipes for trotters

   2 more examples

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

   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

   In Persia, newly married couples were presented with sheep's trotters steeped in vinegar as a love enticement.

   1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 220

4. slangA person's foot.

   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.

   2004, Charley Hester, Kirby Ross, The True Life Wild West Memoir of a Bush-popping Cow Waddy, page 27

5. UKhistoricalA tailor's assistant who goes around to receive orders.

   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.

   1830, William Cobbett, Eleven Lectures on the French and Belgian Revolutions, page 8

1. A surname.

plural Trotters

1. ball gamessomeone connected with Bolton Wanderers Football Club, as a fan, player, coach etc.
2. slangball gamesA player for the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team.