Carriage

How to spell carriage

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce carriage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carriage mean?

1. nounA wheeled vehicle, especially one drawn by horses, for carrying people.
2. nounA separate section of a passenger train where travellers sit.
3. nounThe cost of transporting goods from one place to another.
4. nounThe way a person holds and moves their body.

Carriage in a sentence

• The bride arrived at the church in an open horse-drawn carriage.

• She found a quiet seat in the rear carriage of the express train.

• The invoice lists the price of the goods plus carriage and packing.

• The dance teacher praised her upright carriage and graceful walk.

• The museum displays a restored Victorian carriage with leather seats.

• The buffet car is three carriage lengths down from the platform entrance.

Where does carriage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word arrived in English from Anglo-Norman and Old French cariage, which meant the act of carrying or the goods being carried. That noun was built on the verb carier, 'to carry' or 'to transport', the same verb that gave us 'carry' and 'cargo'. Behind it stands the Late Latin verb carricare, 'to load a wagon', formed from the Latin noun carrus, a four-wheeled baggage wagon that the Romans themselves borrowed from a Celtic word for a wheeled vehicle. English first used carriage in the 1300s for the carrying of loads and the charge for doing so, and only by the 1600s did it settle into its familiar meaning of a wheeled vehicle for people. The doubled r comes straight from carrus, while the -iage ending mirrors French words like 'marriage' and 'voyage', which is exactly why the -iage cluster trips writers up.

How the word is built

• carr- (from Latin carrus: a wheeled wagon)
• -age (noun suffix meaning the action or result of)