car
/kɑː
/- The city council is flexing its muscles after becoming the first local authority in the north west with the power to tow away cars without valid road tax.
- As dawn approached, police set up checkpoints as part of a plan to ban cars carrying fewer than four people from midtown Manhattan.
- The highway roads carry cars and trucks from the suburbs into the city.
Synonyms
- She was switching standard gauge cars without any kind of idler car on the three rail track.
- Our train consists of six coach class cars, a cafe car, and one business class car.
- It used mules to haul two ore cars and a flatcar one and a half miles between its mill at the foot of the mountains and its mine.
Synonyms
- They soon arrived at the lift, and the car arrived within ten seconds of keying for it.
- He had used the ring to get an express elevator car to the top of the Letap Center.
- The car-free village of Bettmeralp which is only accessible by a large-car cableway is located in the immediate vicinity of the impressive Aletsch Glacier.
- Classical Latin poets also used Phoebus as a byname for the sun-god, whence come common references in later European poetry to Phoebus and his car("chariot") as a metaphor for the sun.
- Their armour shone like a flame of blazing fire as they stood in their car: their swift horses struck the earth and pawed it with their hoofs, and the dust rose like smoke about them.
Derivatives
carful
/ noun (plural carfuls) ...- I think that would only happen with certain carfuls of people.
- I brought another carful of stuff over here today - including all my CDs, something I was dreading doing for some reason, so this place gets more and more like my place.
- A carful of teenagers, high on something, zoomed by, a sudden blast of raucous laughter shattering the warm peace of the night.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the general sense 'wheeled vehicle'): from Old Northern French carre, based on Latin carrum, carrus, of Celtic origin.
The earliest recorded uses of car, dating probably from the 14th century, referred to wheeled vehicles such as carts or wagons. The word came into English from Old French carre, based on Latin carrus ‘two-wheeled vehicle’, the source of words such as career, cargo (mid 17th century), carriage (Late Middle English), carry (Late Middle English), charge (Middle English), and chariot (Late Middle English). From the 16th to the 19th centuries car was mainly used in poetic or literary contexts to suggest a sense of splendour and solemnity. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) used it to describe the funeral carriage bearing the body of the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) at his state funeral: ‘And a reverent people behold / The towering car, the sable steeds’ (‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’, 1852). The first self-propelled road vehicle was a steam-driven carriage designed and built in France in 1769, but such vehicles were not called cars until the 1890s.