Sedan

How to spell sedan

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sedan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sedan mean?

1. nounAn enclosed passenger car with a separate boot and seating for four or more people.
2. nounA historical covered chair carried on poles by two bearers, used to transport a seated passenger.

Sedan in a sentence

• The dealership offered a deep discount on last year's four-door sedan.

• In the museum exhibit, an eighteenth-century sedan stood beside the carriage.

• They traded the bulky van for a comfortable family sedan.

• Two bearers lifted the sedan and carried the duchess through the narrow lanes.

Where does sedan come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word sedan first appears in English in the early 1600s as the name for a covered chair carried on two poles by bearers, a fashionable way for the wealthy to be conveyed through crowded streets. Its origin is genuinely uncertain, but the most widely accepted account links it to the Latin verb sedere, meaning 'to sit', or the related noun sedes, meaning 'seat', possibly reaching English through an Italian or southern dialect form. A long-standing folk story tied the name to the town of Sedan in France, but most scholars now regard that as a coincidence rather than the true source. When the enclosed motor car arrived in the early twentieth century, American makers reused sedan for a closed passenger body, since it too was a comfortable seat that carried you along. The link to 'sit' is a useful spelling cue: think of the seat at the heart of the word, sed-, followed by a plain -an.

How the word is built

• sed- (from Latin sedere: to sit)
• -an