Wagon

How to spell wagon

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wagon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wagon mean?

1. nounA four-wheeled vehicle for carrying heavy loads, pulled by horses, a tractor, or coupled to a train.

Wagon in a sentence

• The farmer loaded the hay onto a wooden wagon behind the tractor.

• The freight train pulled a loaded coal wagon across the valley.

Where does wagon come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The word came into English in the early 1500s from the Dutch wagen, which simply meant a wheeled vehicle for hauling goods, and it arrived through the busy trade and shipping contact between England and the Low Countries. The Dutch word goes back to the same ancient Germanic root that produced the native English 'wain', the older poetic word for a cart still seen in surnames and in the constellation called the Plough or Charles's Wain. That shared ancestry traces to a root meaning 'to carry' or 'to move', the same idea behind 'vehicle' and 'wagon' alike. For centuries British writers favoured the doubled spelling 'waggon', and you will still meet it in older novels and on heritage railways, but the single g form 'wagon' has become standard across British, American, and Canadian usage. The lingering memory of that older 'waggon' is the main reason adults sometimes hesitate over how many g's the word needs.

How the word is built

• wagon (from Dutch wagen: a wheeled vehicle for carrying loads); a single root word, related to the older English 'wain'

British and American spelling

Wagon is the American spelling. British English spells it waggon.