Limousine

How to spell limousine

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce limousine

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does limousine mean?

1. nounA large, luxurious car, usually driven by a chauffeur and often hired for special occasions.

Limousine in a sentence

• The wedding party arrived in a white limousine with a uniformed driver.

• The hotel sent a limousine to collect guests from the airport.

Where does limousine come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes straight from French, where it began as the name of Limousin, a rural region in central France famous for its shepherds. Those shepherds wore a distinctive heavy, hooded cloak called a limousine, and when early motor cars appeared with an enclosed passenger compartment and a separate roofed driver's area, the body style reminded people of that protective hood, so the car was nicknamed a limousine. The term entered English around the start of the twentieth century, first describing a chauffeur-driven car in which the driver sat in a partly open or partitioned front section. Over time it broadened to mean any large, luxurious chauffeured car, including the elongated 'stretch' versions hired for weddings and special occasions. The spelling trap is purely French: the unstressed middle vowel sounds like a schwa but is written 'ou', and the ending is the soft '-sine', not '-zeen'.

How the word is built

• limousin (region of central France)
• -e (French feminine ending)