Other forms: trams
A tram is an electric passenger vehicle that runs on rails laid into the street, sharing the road with cars. You wait on a low platform in the middle of the traffic, a bell sounds, and it slides away with the wires humming above it.
Americans say streetcar, or trolley in some cities, for exactly the same vehicle. The word keeps the same company as bus: a tram stop, a tram line, the number 4 tram, a tram ticket. In North American English a tram can also be a cable car hanging from a wire, or the small road train that carries people around an airport or a zoo. Tramway is the track and the system together; a tramline is one route, and in British English the tramlines are also the two parallel lines down each side of a tennis court. Trams vanished from most British cities in the 1950s and have been coming back since, in Manchester, Sheffield and Edinburgh.
1nountramAn electric passenger vehicle that runs on rails set into city streets.
“The tram was so full that she waited for the next one.”
synonyms: streetcar, trolley
2nouncableA cable car, or a small road train carrying passengers short distances (North American).
“A tram runs from the far car park to the terminal every ten minutes.”
tram is a vehicle.
Also accepted in games: streetcar
Tram entered English in the early 1500s from Low German traam, the shaft of a barrow, and Middle Dutch trame, a narrow beam — the wooden beams that mine wagons were pushed along. Further back sit Proto-Germanic *drum, a splinter or fragment, and a Proto-Indo-European word for a peg or post. The tidy story that the word honours the tramway builder Benjamin Outram is false: it was in the language long before he was born.
Proto-Indo-European
*térmn̥
Proto-Germanic
*drum
Middle Low German
trame
Low German
traam
English, today
tram
Borrowed from Scots -, from Low German traam, from Middle Low German trame, from Proto-Germanic drum, from Proto-Indo-European térmn̥. Early 16th century, borrowed from Scots -, probably from Low German traam (“tram, shaft of a barrow”), from Middle Low German - and Middle Dutch trame (“narrow shaft, beam”), said to be ultimately from a lost gmw - (Ingvaeonic) word, probably from Proto-Germanic drum (“splinter, fragment”), from Proto-Indo-European térmn̥ (“peg, post, boundary”), cognate with Latin terminus. Compare Middle Low German treme; vls traam, trame.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA