railroad engineer
1
3.4
- noun
- /ˈreɪlˌrɔrd ˌɛnˈdʒɪnɪr/
- US
:
maquinista
- Please excuse the mixed metaphors: I am a railroad engineer in Candyland.
- become a railroad engineer
Examples
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Mr. Carter told Lottery officials he was planning to retire in March 2013 from his job as a railroad engineer.
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He explained that Thoreau was pronounced "threw" because the village had been named after a railroad engineer and not the poet-essayist.
Fiction book (1993) -
"When I was a boy, the only goddam thing I wanted was to be a railroad engineer."
Fiction book (2001) -
The banners show nurses, doctors, and railroad engineers.
Fiction book (1996) -
Nettie Duffy testified that her husband's frequent departures as a railroad engineer had forced the family to appeal to the Poor Board for relief.
Academic text (1990) -
If a drunken husband could ruin an entire family in a few months and a drunken mob could destroy a whole community in one night, a drunken railroad engineer at the throttle of a train could kill hundreds of people in a few minutes (Timberlake, 1970).
Academic text (2009) -
July 10, 1888 -- November 20, 1978, was an influential pre-Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father who was a railroad engineer.
Blog text (27) -
Today, Hodges works as a railroad engineer based in Texas.
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"My father was a railroad engineer for 35 years," Jack Harbaugh said.
Synonyms
37
2.7
A person who drives a train
1
3.3
A person who controls a train's engine
A person who drives a train or locomotive
A person who drives a train engine
How Experienced
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a person who drives and operates a railway locomotive' is directly and compositionally derived from 'railroad' (relating to trains/tracks) + 'engineer' (a person trained to operate engines). This follows a regular noun-noun compounding pattern with no idiomatic shift and similar forms occur in many languages, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Railroad engineer comes from the simple idea of an engineer on the railroad who runs the train's engine. So, it means 'a person who drives and operates a train's engine'.