Other forms: locomotives
The locomotive is the powered unit at the head of a train, the heavy engine that drags everything behind it. Wheels taller than a person, a whistle, and a long line of carriages with no engine of their own.
The type goes in front: steam locomotive, diesel locomotive, electric locomotive. Railway people shorten it to loco, and in America the everyday word is engine. It is not the whole train — the locomotive is one vehicle, the train is the locomotive plus what it pulls. The word is an adjective as well, in technical writing, meaning to do with moving from place to place, and the related noun locomotion is movement under your own power: human locomotion, the locomotion of an insect.
1nounlocomotiveThe powered railway vehicle that pulls a train.
“A green locomotive was waiting at the platform with steam curling round its wheels.”
synonyms: engine
2adjectivemovementTo do with movement from one place to another.
“The beetle's locomotive power comes from three pairs of legs.”
locomotive is a railway vehicle.
Locomotive was assembled out of Latin: locō, from a place, plus mōtivus, moving. A locomotive is a thing that moves itself away from where it stands — which was the astonishing part in 1814, when the word first attached itself to the steam engines running on rails. Everything before them had to be pushed, pulled or ridden.
Proto-Indo-European
*m(y)ewh₁-
Vulgar Latin
mōtivus — moving
Latin
locō
French
locomotif
English, today
locomotive
Built from
From French locomotif, from Latin locō literally “from a place” (ablative of locus (“place”)) + Vulgar Latin mōtivus (“moving”) (see motive). In the rail transport sense, an ellipsis of locomotive (steam) engine, attested from 1814.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA