Carriages

How to spell carriages

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce carriages

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carriages mean?

1. nounWheeled vehicles, especially horse-drawn ones used for carrying people.
2. nounThe passenger compartments or coaches that make up a train.

Carriages in a sentence

• The museum displays several restored horse-drawn carriages from the 1800s.

• The front three carriages of the train were reserved for season-ticket holders.

• The royal procession used two gilded carriages pulled by white horses.

• Engineers coupled the spare carriages to the rear of the service overnight.

Where does carriages come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back through Old North French cariage, meaning the action of carrying or the goods being carried, which was built on the verb carier 'to transport in a vehicle'. That verb came in turn from the Late Latin carricare 'to load a wagon', formed on carrus, a Celtic-derived Latin word for a wheeled cart. By the time it settled into Middle English in the 1300s, the meaning had broadened from the act of carrying to the wheeled vehicle that did the carrying. The same carrus root sits behind everyday relatives such as 'car', 'cargo', and 'career'. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the ending: the doubled r, the soft -age that sounds like '-idge', and the simple plural -s rather than any change to the stem.

How the word is built

• carri- (from carry, to convey)
• -age (noun suffix denoting result or thing)
• -s (plural)