Auto

How to spell auto

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce auto

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does auto mean?

1. nounA motor car, especially in informal or North American usage.

Auto in a sentence

• He sold his old auto before moving to the city.

• The dealership offered a discount on every new auto this month.

Where does auto come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Auto is a clipped, everyday short form of automobile, which itself was assembled from the Greek auto, meaning 'self', and the Latin mobilis, meaning 'movable' or 'able to move'. The literal sense was therefore a vehicle that moves by itself, without horses or external pulling, an idea that felt genuinely novel when motor cars appeared in the late nineteenth century. The full word automobile reached English around the 1890s, borrowed from French, where automobile had been coined for the new horseless carriages. English speakers quickly trimmed it to auto, especially in North America, just as British speakers trimmed it to car. The same Greek auto, 'self', sits inside many familiar words such as automatic, autonomy, and autograph, and remembering that 'self' sense helps fix the simple a-u-t-o spelling.

How the word is built

• auto (from Greek autos: self), here a clipped form of automobile