Also 8–9 sulkey, 9 sulkee, sulkie. [subst. use of SULKY a.]
1. A light two-wheeled carriage or chaise (sometimes without a body), seated for one person: now used principally in America for trials of speed between trotting-horses. (So called because it admits only one person. Cf. DÉSOBLIGEANT.)
1756. Connoisseur, No. 112, ¶ 4. A formal female seated in a Sulky, foolishly pleased with having the whole vehicle to herself.
1775. J. Adams, in Fam. Lett. (1876), 55. My mare … ran and dashed the body of the sulky all to pieces.
1796. Southey, Lett. fr. Spain (1799), 118. Many sulkies drawn by three mules abreast.
1860. O. W. Holmes, Elsie V., xi. The doctor turned and looked through the little round glass in the back of the sulky.
1882. Standard, 1 Dec., 5/4. (Canada) The din and noise of waggons,… buggies, sulkees, and ox teams.
1884. B’ham Daily Post, 23 Feb., 2/5. American Trotting Sulkie, weighs 56 lb.; to carry 180 lb.
2. transf. a. A bathing-machine for one. jocular.
1806–7. J. Beresford, Miseries Hum. Life (1807), XIV. vi. On re-entering your Sulky in your new character,… you discover, for the first time, that your own towel is safely locked up at home.
b. (See quot.)
1862. Mrs. Speid, Last Years India, 129. A little silver ‘sulky,’… a small spherical box, pierced all over with small holes [etc.]. This pretty apparatus is intended for brewing a single cup of tea, by the morosely inclined.
3. Short for sulky-plough (see 4).
1891. C. Roberts, Adrift Amer., 37. Two single-furrow sulkies with three horses each.
4. attrib. passing into adj., applied to (a) a set of articles for the use of a single person, (b) an agricultural implement having a seat for the driver (U.S.).
1786. Mackenzie, Lounger, No. 89, ¶ 7. A dispute about the age of a sulky set of China.
1875. Knight, Dict. Mech., 2452. Sulky-cultivator, one having a seat for the rider, who manages the plows, moving them to the right or left as the plants in the rows may require. Ibid., Sulky-rake, a horse-rake having an elevated seat for the driver.
1879. Henry King, in Scribner’s Mag., Nov., 137/1. The next spring I dickered for a cow and some shoats, and bought me a sulky-plow, and put in forty acres of corn.
