Cart

How to spell cart

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cart

What does cart mean?

1. nounA small wheeled vehicle used for carrying goods, often pulled by hand, by an animal, or pushed.
2. verbTo carry or transport something, often with effort or in a wheeled vehicle.

Cart in a sentence

• noun

  The farmer loaded the hay onto a wooden cart.

• verb

  The movers had to cart every box up three flights of stairs.

• noun

  She pushed the shopping cart down the supermarket aisle.

• verb

  Workers cart the rubble away from the demolition site each morning.

Where does cart come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Cart traces back to the Old Norse word kartr, meaning a small wheeled vehicle for carrying loads, and it overlapped with the closely related Old English cræt, which described much the same thing. The two forms blended in early Middle English, giving us the familiar one-syllable word we still use. For centuries a cart was specifically a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by a horse or ox, distinct from the four-wheeled wagon, and that practical farming sense dominated for a long time. The meaning later widened to cover any small handcart or trolley, including the supermarket cart of American usage and the golf cart of modern leisure. Because the spelling simply mirrors the way it sounds, with no silent letters or tricky vowels, cart has stayed one of the most phonetically transparent words in English.

How the word is built

• cart (single root, a small wheeled vehicle); no prefix or suffix in the base form

Words that sound like cart

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• kart: A small, low, open four-wheeled motor vehicle used in the sport of racing on a circuit.