Automobile

How to spell automobile

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce automobile

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does automobile mean?

1. nounA road vehicle powered by its own engine, designed to carry a small number of passengers.

Automobile in a sentence

• The dealership displayed every new automobile under bright showroom lights.

• Factory workers assembled each automobile along a moving production line.

Where does automobile come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is a hybrid built from the Greek prefix auto-, meaning 'self', and the Latin-derived element mobile, from mobilis, meaning 'movable' or 'able to be moved'. Put together, an automobile is literally a 'self-moving' vehicle, one that carries its own engine rather than being pulled by a horse. The compound was coined in French as automobile in the late nineteenth century, when the first petrol-driven carriages appeared, and English adopted it around the 1890s. The same auto- element runs through autograph, automatic, and autonomy, while mobilis survives in mobile and mobility. In everyday British and Canadian speech 'car' has largely overtaken the longer form, though 'automobile' remains common in American usage and in formal or industrial contexts.

How the word is built

• auto- (self)
• mobile (from Latin mobilis: movable, capable of moving)