Ambulance

How to spell ambulance

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ambulance

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ambulance mean?

1. nounA vehicle equipped to carry sick or injured people to hospital, usually in an emergency.

Ambulance in a sentence

• The dispatcher sent an ambulance to the crash site within minutes.

• Paramedics loaded the patient into the ambulance and switched on the siren.

Where does ambulance come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French ambulance, which in the early nineteenth century described a mobile field hospital that followed an army into battle. That term grew out of the French phrase hopital ambulant, literally a 'walking hospital', built on the Latin verb ambulare, meaning 'to walk' or 'to move about'. The whole point of the original ambulance was mobility: it moved to where the wounded soldiers lay rather than waiting for them to be carried back. English borrowed the word during the Crimean War period in the 1850s, and over time the meaning narrowed from the entire mobile medical unit to the single vehicle that transports the sick and injured. The same ambulare root still walks quietly inside words like 'amble', 'perambulate', and 'somnambulist', and it explains the otherwise odd 'bul' in the middle that writers sometimes garble.

How the word is built

• ambul- (from Latin ambulare: to walk, move about)
• -ance (noun suffix)