Other forms: depots
A depot is the yard where a fleet lives. The buses come back at the end of the day to be washed, filled and parked in rows behind a wire fence, and one lit window stays on all night.
Say it DEP-oh in Britain and DEE-poh in America; the t is silent either way, and getting that wrong is the commonest thing that happens to this word. It also means a store rather than a yard — a food depot, an arms depot, a depot where a charity keeps donated furniture. And in American English a small railway or bus station is a depot, which is why the word turns up in so many old songs about trains. It sits happily in front of another noun: bus depot, goods depot, supply depot.
1noundepotThe yard or building where buses, trains or lorries are kept, cleaned and repaired.~15%
“The last bus goes back to the depot at midnight.”
2nounplaceA place where supplies are stored until they are needed.~60%
“Grain was moved out of the depot by truck.”
3nounsmallIn American English, a small railway or bus station.~25%
“She waited for him at the depot on Main Street.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 127 sentences found in the wild and placed 79 of them on a sense (48 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
depot is a storage yard.
It came in from French dépôt, and before that Old French depost — Medieval Latin dēpositum, a thing put down. That makes it the same word as deposit, arriving twice by different roads. The little hat on the French ô is the ghost of the s in depost, and English kept the silent t as a souvenir.
Medieval Latin
dēpositum
Old French
depost
French
dépôt
English, today
depot
From French dépôt, from Old French depost, from Medieval Latin dēpositum, from Latin -, participle of depono. a doublet of deposit.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA