cattle car
4
4.7
- noun
- /ˈkætəl kɑr/
:
vagón de ganado
- The cattle car swayed gently as it traveled along the tracks, filled with animals for the county fair.
- trains with cattle car
- cattle car doors
- packed into cattle cars
The use of cattle cars to ship my people to the gas chambers.
- The use of cattle cars to ship my people to the gas chambers.
- And then they would transport us around in cattle cars from place to place and we would just freeze our butts off, right.
Examples
-
A guard slides open the gate of a cattle car, and this first unlucky group climbs aboard.
Fiction book (1993) -
Were they only cattle cars or personal ones, too?
Fiction book (2000) -
You just shoved me back here into this cattle car.
-
The sun is higher, the cattle cars hotter.
Fiction book (1993) -
Waves of heat rise from the roofs of the long string of cattle cars.
Fiction book (1993) -
Then, in 1944, came the ghettoization of the Jews in Sighet, followed by their deportation in cattle cars to Birkenau.
Academic text (1996) -
A trainman waving a lantern guides an engineer who's slowly backing an empty cattle car along the tracks.
Fiction book (1993) -
The farmer loaded the sheep into the cattle car for transport to the market.
-
A train filled with cattle cars made its way through the countryside, carrying livestock to different farms.
Synonyms
130
5.7
A vehicle on tracks that carries passengers or goods
6
2.5
A vehicle on railway tracks that carries people or goods
4
3.2
A vehicle on a train that carries goods like boxes or crates
1
6.3
A train wagon with bars on the sides for carrying animals like cows
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and predictably built from 'cattle' (livestock) + 'car' (rail vehicle): a vehicle for transporting cattle. This noun–noun compounding pattern is common and cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Cattle car comes from the simple image of a rail car made to carry cattle. People used these cars to move animals to market, so the name now means 'a rail freight car for livestock'.