Automotive
adjectiveRelating to motor vehicles and the industry that designs, builds, and repairs them.
How to spell automotive
10 letters · 4 syllables
How to pronounce automotive
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does automotive mean?
- adjectiveRelating to motor vehicles and the industry that designs, builds, and repairs them.
Automotive in a sentence
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She spent a decade working in the automotive industry before switching careers.
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The factory supplies automotive parts to several major car manufacturers.
Where does automotive come from?
Language of origin: Latin
This word is a hybrid built from a Greek prefix and a Latin root. The first part comes from the Greek autos, meaning 'self', the same element that gives us automatic and autonomy. The second part traces to the Latin verb movere, 'to move', through its participle motus, which also sits inside motor, motion, and motive. Stitched together, automotive literally describes something that is self-moving, and it emerged in English around the end of the nineteenth century alongside the rise of the motor car. It quickly settled into its modern role as the standard adjective for anything relating to motor vehicles and the industry that builds them. The spelling trap is the quiet middle: the unstressed 'o' in the 'mot' syllable is easy to drop or swap, even though it points straight back to the Latin word for movement.
How the word is built
- auto- (self)
- mot (move, from Latin movere)
- -ive (adjective suffix)
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