Other forms: garages
A garage is the room beside a house where the car is kept. Concrete floor, up-and-over door, and rather more boxes than car.
It is also the business where cars are repaired and fuel is sold, which is why in Britain you take the car to the garage and put it in the garage on the same afternoon. The word came from French and kept two pronunciations in British English, neither of which is wrong. It has lent its name to a genre of music and to garage sales, and a band that rehearses in one is a garage band.
1noungarageA building beside a house for keeping a car in.~80%
“The bikes are at the back of the garage.”
2nounbusinessA business that repairs and services vehicles.~20%
“The garage rang to say it was ready.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 15 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A garage is a place where something is kept under cover. French garer means to dock, to shunt or to shelter, so the word first described putting a thing safely out of the way and only later the building it went into.
French
garage — keeping under cover, protection, shelter
English, today
garage
Built from
French garage (“keeping under cover, protection, shelter”), derivative of French garer (“to keep under cover, dock, shunt, guard, keep”), from Middle French garer, garrer, guerrer; partly from Old French garir, warir (from Old Frankish warjan); and partly from Old French varer (“to fight, defend oneself, protect”), from Old Norse varask (“to defend oneself”), reflexive of vara (“to ware, watch out, defend”); both ultimately from Proto-Germanic warjaną (“to defend, ward off”), warōną (“to watch, protect”), from Proto-Indo-European wer- (“to close, cover, protect, save, defend”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA