charley horse

1. 1.

   a muscular cramp (especially in the thigh or calf) following vigorous exercise

   Synonymscharley-horse

   Broaderspasm

   colloquialism

Questions about charley horse

What does charley horse mean?

charley horse means "a muscular cramp (especially in the thigh or calf) following vigorous exercise".

What is another word for charley horse?

Close synonyms include charley-horse. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is charley horse a common word?

charley horse is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.