Coach

How to spell coach

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce coach

What does coach mean?

1. nounA person who trains or instructs a team, athlete, or learner.
2. verbTo train, instruct, or guide someone toward a goal.
3. nounA long-distance bus, or a railway carriage.

Coach in a sentence

• noun

  The football coach named the starting lineup an hour before kickoff.

• verb

  He agreed to coach the junior staff through their first big presentation.

• noun

  The tour group boarded the coach for the long drive to the coast.

• noun

  She hired a voice coach to prepare for the interview.

• verb

  A good manager will coach rather than simply give orders.

• noun

  Every coach on the express train had been refurbished with new seating.

Where does coach come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word traces back to the small Hungarian village of Kocs, where a particularly comfortable kind of horse-drawn wagon was developed in the 1400s. The Hungarian term kocsi szeker meant literally 'wagon from Kocs', and the place name itself became the name of the vehicle. From Hungarian it spread across Europe, becoming Kutsche in German and coche in French, before arriving in English in the 1500s as 'coach', meaning a large enclosed carriage. The modern sense of a sports or skills trainer is surprisingly recent: at British universities in the 1830s, a private tutor who 'carried' a student through their exams was jokingly called a coach, as if conveying them like a carriage. From that academic slang it broadened to athletics and then to almost any kind of mentor, which is why one short word now covers a bus, a railway compartment, and a personal instructor.

How the word is built

• coach (single root, from Hungarian kocsi, a wagon from the town of Kocs)