Year of the Horse

Personality

The Horse arrived seventh — having been neck and neck with the Snake before noticing it at the last moment and shying away. This moment of surprise is very Horse: fully committed, completely caught off guard, and ultimately forfeiting ground to something it hadn't planned for. Those born under the Horse are magnificent in motion and occasionally undone by what they didn't see coming.

Horse people carry an infectious energy that makes them genuinely fun to be around — until you try to slow them down. You love people, conversation, novelty, and movement. You throw yourself into your enthusiasms with total commitment, and you burn through them just as completely. You are warm-hearted and generous, loyal in your fashion, and deeply allergic to anything that feels like a cage.

Challenges

The Horse's freedom-loving nature can become a chronic inability to commit. You can start more things than you finish, fall in and out of relationships more than you'd like to admit, and make decisions based on feeling rather than foresight. The Horse who learns to slow down long enough to think — and to see commitment not as captivity but as depth — discovers a whole new dimension of life.

In Life & Career

Horses are drawn to sales, travel, journalism, entertainment, sport, politics, and any role that keeps them moving and puts them in front of people. You need a career with variety built in; a desk and a routine will make you restless within a month.

Compatibility

Famous Horse People

In Japanese

In Japanese, the Horse is known as the character 午 (pronounced uma in the context of the zodiac). This is the traditional kanji used in the 干支 (eto) calendar system, which assigns an animal and element to each year in a sixty-year cycle.