Other forms: steeds
A steed is a horse for riding, in poetic use. A noble steed, mount his steed, a fine steed.
It is archaic and belongs to ballads, romances and deliberate humour — calling a bicycle your trusty steed is the commonest modern use by a wide margin. In older writing it specifically meant a warhorse rather than any horse. Note that steed comes from the same root as stud, meaning a place where horses are bred, so a steed was originally a stallion kept for breeding.
1nounsteedA horse for riding, in poetic use.
“The knight mounted his noble steed and rode off to battle.”
steed is a riding horse.
STEED → prized for its SPEED
It is prized above all for its speed, and ridden for nothing else.
hooks ontospeed
Old English steda meant a stallion or stud horse, from the same root as stud and stand. The poetic sense narrowed to a warhorse and then widened again to any horse in verse.
Proto-West Germanic
*stōdijō
Old English
stēda — stallion, stud
Middle English
stede — steed
English, today
steed
Middle English stede (“steed”), from Old English stēda (“stallion, stud”), from Proto-West Germanic stōdijō; (compare Old Dutch stoti (“herd of horses”), Old High German stuot (“herd of horses”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire