Trailer

How to spell trailer

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce trailer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does trailer mean?

1. nounA wheeled, unpowered vehicle pulled behind a car or lorry to carry goods, animals, or equipment.
2. nounA short series of clips advertising a forthcoming film or programme.

Trailer in a sentence

• They loaded the garden waste onto a small trailer behind the car.

• The trailer for the new thriller revealed far too much of the plot.

• The horse was led carefully up the ramp into the trailer.

• She watched the official trailer online before booking cinema tickets.

Where does trailer come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows directly out of the verb 'trail', which English took from the Old French 'trailler', meaning 'to tow' or 'to drag along the ground'. That French verb traces back to the Latin 'tragula', a kind of dragnet hauled across a field or river, itself related to the verb 'trahere', meaning 'to draw' or 'to pull' (the same root that gives us 'tractor' and 'traction'). The noun 'trailer' was coined in English in the early 1800s to name simply 'one that trails', and by the late nineteenth century it described a wheeled vehicle towed behind another. The cinema sense, a short preview of a coming film, arose in the 1920s because such clips originally 'trailed' after the main feature rather than preceding it. The spelling is regular once you see the 'trail' plus '-er' build, so the only real trap is remembering the 'ai' vowel pair rather than a single letter.

How the word is built

• trail (to drag or tow behind)
• -er (noun suffix: a thing that does the action)