Other forms: vehicles
A vehicle is any machine on wheels that carries people or goods. A car, a van, a lorry, a bus.
It is the formal, catch-all word, which is why it fills road signs, insurance documents and police reports where car would be too narrow. Nobody says it about their own car in conversation. It has a useful figurative sense meaning something used to carry an idea or a career, so a film can be a vehicle for a star, and language is a vehicle for thought. Chemistry and medicine use it for a liquid that carries an active ingredient.
1nounvehicleA machine, usually with wheels, for transporting people or goods.~98%
“No vehicles are allowed past this point.”
2nounmeansA means of expressing or achieving something.~2%
“The magazine became a vehicle for his opinions.”
formal in this meaning — an editor’s judgement
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A vehicle is a carrier: Latin vehiculum, from vehō, to carry. The word says nothing about wheels, which is why a vehicle for an idea is not really a metaphor.
Proto-Indo-European
*weǵʰ-
French
véhicule
English, today
vehicle
Built from
Borrowed from French véhicule. French véhicule, from Latin vehiculum (“a carriage, conveyance”), from vehō (“to carry”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA