Other forms: cars
A car is the four-wheeled machine most families drive. Drive a car, park the car, a second-hand car.
Automobile is the formal American word and motor car the old British one; car is what everybody says. In American English a car is also a railway carriage — the dining car, ride in the last car — which is a common source of confusion. Note the compounds car park, car boot, car wash, car crash and car pool, and that in British English a car boot sale is a market held from open car boots in a field.
1nouncarA four-wheeled road vehicle for a small number of people.~86%
“The car has done two hundred thousand miles.”
synonyms: automobile, motor
2nounrailwayA railway carriage.~14%
“The dining car is three cars forward.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
car is a vehicle.
Also accepted in games: automobile
Latin carrus was a Gaulish word for a two-wheeled wagon, borrowed into Latin from Celtic. Cart, carry, carriage, chariot and career all descend from it, which makes car one of the very few Celtic words to reach modern English through Rome.
Middle English
carre
English, today
car
From Middle English carre. Middle English carre, borrowed from Anglo-Norman carre, from fro-nor - (compare Old French char), from Latin carrus (“two-wheeled baggage wagon”), from cel-gau karros, from Proto-Celtic karros (“wagon”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱr̥sós (“vehicle”). a doublet of carrus and horse.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA