tram
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: enpr: trăm
ipa: /tɹæm/
ipa: /tɹam/
ipa: /tɹɛm/
ipa: /ʈɾæm/
ipa: [t̠ᶴɹɛə̯m]
ipa: [t̠ᶴɹeə̯m]
ipa: [t̠ᶴɹɛːm]
rhymes: -æm
Forms: form: trams
Etymology: 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 West Germanic (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; West Flemish traam, trame.
The popular derivation from the surname of the English pioneer tramway builder Benjamin Outram (1764–1805) is false: the term pre-dated him.
The sense of a rail vehicle derives from tram-way, in its earliest sense meaning literally a log-covered road, but later applied to the earliest wooden railways, used for transporting coal in carts which came to be called "trams".
Senses: examples: text: Lizzie and she got a dozen of large bottles and the loan of a basket and we got a currant pan and a half-pound of cooked ham in the shop next door and got on the tram for Whitehall.
ref: 1981, Brendan Behan, edited by Peter Fallon, After the Wake: Twenty-one Prose Works including Previously Unpublished Material (Classic Irish Fiction Series), Dublin: The O'Brien Press, →ISBN:
topics: rail-transport
railways
transport
synonyms: streetcar
trolley
glosses: A passenger vehicle for public use that runs on tracks in the road (called a streetcar or trolley in North America).
examples: text: Trams are a kind of sledge on which coals are brought from the place where they are hewn to the shaft. A tram has four wheels but a sledge is without wheels.
ref: 1789, John Brand, History and Antiquities of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne: Including an Account of the Coal Trade of that Place, volume II, London: White, →OCLC, page 681:
glosses: A similar vehicle for carrying materials.
examples: text: The game Half-Life, for example, begins with a movie in which Gordon Freeman, the player's avatar, takes a tram ride through the Black Mesa research complex while a voice explains why he is there.
ref: 2013, Ernest Adams, “Storytelling”, in Fundamentals of Game Design, 3rd edition, [San Francisco, Calif.]: New Riders, →ISBN, page 215:
topics: rail-transport
railways
transport
glosses: A people mover.
examples: text: It's possible that my family took the tram to Roosevelt Island at some point and the experience embedded itself deep into my imagination where it mixed with other flights of fancy (pun intended) of flying through a Gotham-like city like Batman.
ref: 2014, Vivienne Gucwa, “Skylines”, in NY through the Lens, Cincinnati, Oh.: Print Books, →ISBN, page 129:
glosses: An aerial cable car.
examples: text: Taking advantage of the VIP Experience at Universal Studios provides a more intimate and authentic look at the studio than does the regular studio tram tour. […] The VIP Experience gets you off the tram and behind the scenes: into sound stages, prop warehouses, and production facilities and on the sets of shows in production.
ref: 2005, Jan Friedman, Eccentric California, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire: Bradt Travel Guides, →ISBN, page 124:
text: Each morning, still-groggy early-bird park-goers stumble from the parking-lot tram and head straight to La Brea's cafeteria-style Express for a caffeinated pick-me-up or a meal to start the day.
ref: 2007, Matthew Richard Poole, Frommer's Los Angeles 2008, Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 236:
glosses: A train with wheels that runs on a road; a trackless train.
examples: text: The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats […]
ref: 1976 [1925], Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin”, in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, page 93:
glosses: A car on a horse railway or tramway (horse trams preceded electric trams).
examples: text: What struck me with most astonishment, however, was the liberal manner of our fair driver, who made no scruple of taking a leap, with the reins in her hand, and seating herself dexterously upon the shafts (or, in Westmoreland phrase, the trams) of the cart.
ref: 1851, Thomas de Quincey, “William Wordsworth and Robert Southey”, in Literary Reminiscences; from the Autobiography of an English Opium-eater. […] In Two Volumes, volume II, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, →OCLC, pages 14–15:
glosses: The shaft of a cart.
glosses: One of the rails of a tramway.
Derived terms: aerial tram
man on the Bondi tram
man on the Shau Kei Wan tram
shoot through like a Bondi tram
tramcar
tram driver
Tram Inn
tramline
tram line
tram locomotive
tramplate
tramrail
tram rail
tramroad
tram-road
tramshed
tram stop
tram track
tram-train
tramway
tram-way
Related terms: cablecar
light rail
streetcar
trolley car