Metaphorical uses of horse in Hungarian and English: What can the dictionary and the corpus tell us?

The paper addresses the issue of the extent to which cultural similarity is reflected in English and Hungarian conventional metaphors related to the source domain HORSE. Bilingual dictionary data seem to show a rather lower degree of equivalence in imagery than expected between English and Hungarian figurative expressions. Hungarian corpus data support the lexicographic evidence. Idiomatic expressions originate in everyday human experience, especially past rather than current, but knowledge of previous discourse, intertextuality and other aspects of culture are also relevant.