Other forms: carriages
A carriage is one of the linked boxes that make up a train. You walk from carriage to carriage with your ticket in your teeth, sliding the doors between them, hunting for a seat with nobody's coat on it. The letter is painted by the door, and the last carriage is always the emptiest.
Before trains it meant the horse-drawn kind: a black box on four tall wheels with a driver up top, which is what still turns out for weddings and in films. The word also covers the cost of moving goods, so an invoice reading carriage paid means the sender has covered the delivery. Americans say car for the train sense and baby carriage for what the British call a pram. There is an old use for the way a person holds their body — an upright carriage — which you will meet in nineteenth-century novels and nowhere else. Even your keyboard has one in its history: the carriage return on a typewriter was the lever that shoved the paper-holder back to the left.
1nouncarriageOne of the separate sections of a passenger train.~19%
“Our seats are in the quiet carriage, three from the front.”
2nouncoachA vehicle with wheels, pulled by horses, for carrying people.~63%
“A carriage was waiting at the gates with two grey horses.”
synonyms: coach, cab
3nounchargeThe charge for transporting goods.~16%
“The price is forty pounds, carriage included.”
4nounholdsThe way a person holds their head and body — an old-fashioned use.~2%
“He had the straight carriage of a soldier.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 177 sentences found in the wild and placed 127 of them on a sense (50 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
carriage is a vehicle.
Also accepted in games: coach
c-ARRIAGE → m-ARRIAGE
Two white horses wait outside the church. The marriage comes pouring out of the door — bride, hats, rice in the air — and all of it climbs into the tall black box on wheels behind the horses.
hooks ontomarriage
The whole of it is Old French carier, to carry — the same verb behind English carry. A carriage is simply a thing that carries, which is why one word covers the box the horses pull, the section of a train you sit in, and the charge for carrying your goods from one place to another.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱers-
fro-nor
cariage
Middle English
cariage
English, today
carriage
Built from
From Middle English cariage, from fro-nor cariage, from carier (“to carry”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA