Origin
The term began as horse racing parlance for a race horse that is not known to gamblers and thus is difficult to place betting odds on.
The earliest-known mention of the concept is in Benjamin Disraeli's novel The Young Duke (1831). Disraeli's protagonist, the Duke of St. James, attends a horse race with a surprise finish: "A dark horse which had never been thought of, and which the careless St. James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph."
Read more about this topic: Dark Horse
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