It was a typical one-horse shay of thirty years ago.

Unlike the collapse of the proverbial one-horse shay, it usually doesn't happen all at once.

The one-horse shay is a light, covered, two-wheeled carriage for two persons, drawn by a single horse.

But some pieces linger in their raw condition, including a one-horse shay he bought 25 years ago, when he had a horse.

The one-horse shay is colloquially known in the USA as a 'one-hoss shay'.

The one-horse shay is a US adaptation, originating in Union, Maine, of the French chaise.

A smaller and more lightly constructed version of the one-horse shay is called a chair or 'whiskey' because it can "whisk" around other carriages and pass them quickly.

So he tied up his feet, and went on limping about and coughing, until at last he fell to pieces, all at once and in a heap, like the One-Horse Shay.

A man does not go like the one-horse shay, he wrote, but dies little by little usually, in imperceptible gradations, and the question of reversibility at any stage depends on the state of medical art.

A story about very precise engineering is given in the 1858 story The Deacon's Masterpiece or, the Wonderful "One-hoss Shay": A Logical Story by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., which tells of a carriage (one-horse shay)

She sought to ease it by an almost daily letter to Wrentham, written on an ancient typewriter that she compared to a "one-horse shay" and that she had knocked off its swinging desk perch the first day she was in the unfamiliar surroundings of Lenore's home.

The two-wheeled version, usually of a chair-backed type, for one or two persons, also called a gig or one-horse shay, had a body hung on leather straps or thorough-braces and was usually drawn by one horse; a light chaise having two seats was a double chair.