Tram

How to spell tram

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tram

What does tram mean?

1. nounA passenger vehicle that runs on rails laid into the street, drawing power from an overhead line.
2. nounA short shuttle vehicle or aerial cable car that carries people over a fixed route, such as at an airport or resort.

Tram in a sentence

• The city replaced its old buses with a modern tram network.

• A free tram carries travellers between the terminals at the airport.

• She caught the tram from the station to the market square.

• The ski resort runs an aerial tram up to the summit lodge.

Where does tram come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The word tram comes from a Low German and Dutch family of words, including Middle Low German 'traam' and Middle Dutch 'trame', meaning a beam, a shaft, or the rung of a ladder. In northern English and Scots mining dialect it came to mean the wooden or metal bar of a barrow, and then the truck or wagon that ran on rails to haul coal underground. From the wagon the sense shifted to the rails themselves, giving 'tramway', and by the early 1800s it described the railed vehicles that carried both freight and passengers. When street railways spread through British cities in the nineteenth century, 'tram' became the everyday name for the passenger car running on tracks, while American English kept 'streetcar' or 'trolley' instead. The short, plain spelling reflects its humble industrial roots rather than any Latin or French polish.

How the word is built

• tram (beam, shaft, or rail bar), now a standalone noun