Tractor

How to spell tractor

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tractor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tractor mean?

1. nounA powerful motor vehicle with large rear wheels, used on farms to pull equipment and haul loads.

Tractor in a sentence

• The farmer drove the tractor across the muddy field at dawn.

• A slow tractor held up traffic on the narrow country lane.

Where does tractor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin verb trahere, meaning 'to pull' or 'to draw', whose past participle stem tractus gave rise to the agent noun tractor, literally 'a thing that pulls'. English first used 'tractor' in the early modern period for various pulling devices, but the familiar farm meaning arrived only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when steam and then petrol machines replaced horses for hauling ploughs. The same trahere root pulls its weight all across English: it lies behind 'tract', 'traction', 'attract', 'subtract' and 'contract', each carrying some flavour of drawing or pulling. Because the agent suffix here is spelled -or rather than the more common -er, the ending is the one spot worth fixing in memory. The connection is easy to hold onto: a tractor is the machine that does the pulling, and the -tract- core ties it straight to traction.

How the word is built

• tract (from Latin trahere, tractus: to pull or draw)
• -or (agent noun suffix: thing that does)