Kart

How to spell kart

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce kart

What does kart mean?

1. nounA small, low, open four-wheeled motor vehicle used in the sport of racing on a circuit.

Kart in a sentence

• He strapped on his helmet and climbed into the racing kart.

• The indoor track rents a kart by the half hour to weekend drivers.

Where does kart come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Kart is a deliberate respelling of the much older English word cart, which itself goes back to Old Norse kartr and the related Old English craet, both meaning a small open wheeled vehicle pulled along by hand or by an animal. When small, low, engine-powered racing vehicles were invented in California in the mid 1950s, makers and enthusiasts adopted the snappier spelling with a k to mark this new machine as something distinct from an ordinary farm or shopping cart. The brand name Go-Kart, used by an early American manufacturer, helped fix the k spelling in the public mind, and the sport built around the vehicles became known as karting. So while cart traces a long path through Norse and Anglo-Saxon, kart is essentially a modern marketing-era variant whose unusual k is the whole point. That is exactly the spelling trap: the everyday word is cart with a c, but the racing machine keeps the deliberate k.

How the word is built

• kart (respelled variant of cart, used specifically for small racing vehicles)

Words that sound like kart

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

• cart: A small wheeled vehicle used for carrying goods, often pulled by hand, by an animal, or pushed.