Coaches

How to spell coaches

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce coaches

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does coaches mean?

1. nounMore than one person who trains or instructs athletes, teams, or learners.
2. verbTrains, tutors, or instructs someone, especially in sport or a skill (third-person singular).
3. nounMore than one long-distance bus or railway carriage.

Coaches in a sentence

• noun

  The football club hired two new coaches for the season.

• verb

  She coaches the junior swimming squad every weekday morning.

• noun

  Three coaches were waiting outside the station to take the tour group north.

• noun

  The fitness coaches met to plan the weekly training schedule.

• verb

  He coaches new staff through their first month on the job.

• noun

  The rear coaches on the train were reserved for the school party.

Where does coaches come from?

Language of origin: Other

The root word coach has a surprisingly precise birthplace: it comes from the Hungarian word kocsi, short for kocsi szeker, meaning a 'wagon from Kocs', a village in Hungary where a light, fast covered carriage was first built in the 1400s. The design spread across Europe, and the name travelled with it through German and French before English borrowed it in the late 1500s as a word for a large horse-drawn carriage. The figurative sense of a 'coach' as a trainer or tutor appeared in 1800s university slang, the idea being that a tutor carries a struggling student through an examination much as a carriage carries a passenger. From there it broadened to sports trainers and, eventually, to long-distance buses and railway carriages. The plural and verb form coaches simply adds -es because the base ends in the soft -ch sound, which keeps the spelling regular and free of the doubling traps that catch other words.

How the word is built

• coach (carriage/trainer, from Hungarian kocsi)
• -es (plural/third-person suffix)