Other forms: hearses
A hearse is the vehicle that carries a coffin to the funeral. Long, black, glass-sided, and driven very slowly.
The slow pace is deliberate and traditional, and other drivers in Britain still hold back out of respect, which is one of the few surviving pieces of public etiquette around death. The word originally meant a frame for holding candles over a coffin and shifted to the carriage beneath it. Modern ones are usually converted estate cars, built long enough to take a coffin and the flowers with it.
1nounhearseA vehicle for carrying a coffin at a funeral.
“The hearse pulled up outside the church.”
A hearse was a harrow. Old French herce named a triangular frame of spikes that held candles, the same word as the farm harrow, and behind it stands Latin herpex, from an Oscan word for wolf, named for its teeth.
Medieval Latin
hercia
Proto-Indo-European
*ǵʰers- — stiff, rigid, bristled
osc
hirpus — wolf
Latin
*herpicem
Old French
herce
Middle English
herse
English, today
hearse
Built from
From Middle English herse, hers, herce, from Old French herce in the sense "triangular framework used to support candles". Ultimately the same word as herce (“harrow”), from Latin herpicem, accusative singular of herpex, a variant form of hirpex (“harrow”). The agricultural device's name comes from osc hirpus (“wolf”), a reference to a harrow's many teeth. The term for wolf may ultimately be from Proto-Indo-European ǵʰers- (“stiff, rigid, bristled”). The Oscan term is related to Latin hīrsūtus (“bristly, shaggy”), whence English hirsute. The TLFi considers the "framework to support candles" sense of the French word to be derived more specifically from Medieval Latin hercia; in any case, this is ultimately from the same source. (Du Cange sees in hercia a contraction of an extended form herpicia. It may instead simply be a Latinization of herce.) a doublet of herse.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA