Lorry

How to spell lorry

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lorry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lorry mean?

1. nounA large motor vehicle for transporting goods by road; a truck.

Lorry in a sentence

• The delivery lorry blocked the narrow lane for almost an hour.

• A heavy lorry rumbled past the warehouse before dawn.

Where does lorry come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Lorry is one of those everyday words whose origins remain genuinely murky. It first appears in British English in the 1830s and 1840s, where it described a low, flat railway wagon used to carry heavy goods. The most widely cited suggestion connects it to the northern English dialect verb 'lurry', meaning to pull, lug, or drag something along, which would fit a vehicle built for hauling loads. With the rise of motor vehicles in the early twentieth century the name transferred from the rail wagon to the petrol and diesel road haulage vehicle, the sense most British speakers know today. Because no single secure source has ever been pinned down, dictionaries label its origin as uncertain, and the doubled 'r' followed by the unstressed '-y' ending is simply a spelling that settled by convention rather than by any traceable root.

How the word is built

• lorr- (uncertain root, perhaps the dialect verb 'lurry' meaning to pull or drag)
• -y (noun suffix)