refrigerator car
- noun
- /rɪˈfrɪdʒəˌreɪtər kɑr/
- Specialized
:
vagón refrigerado
- Six thousand refrigerator cars shuttling between the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf bore the Big "V" insignia.
Examples
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A train carrying refrigerator cars delivered fresh produce to the grocery store every morning.
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He was watching refrigerator cars.
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A year ago he'd opened an agency in Atlanta, shipping barrels of beer from Chicago in his own refrigerator cars.
Fiction book (1993) -
During the summer, we saw many refrigerator cars transporting ice cream across the country.
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The shipment of seafood was sent in a refrigerator car to ensure it stayed cold during transit.
How Cold
- Specialized
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a railway car with refrigeration for transporting perishables' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'refrigerator' (a device for preserving food) with 'car' (a vehicle), following a common noun‑noun compounding pattern. This compositional logic is cross‑linguistically frequent and would be easily inferred by a B1 learner who knows both constituent words.
Etymology
The compound refrigerator car comes from early trains that put large blocks of ice inside a car to keep meat and fruit cold. The picture of a train car acting like a refrigerator makes it easy to remember that the term means a train car made to keep food or other items from going bad.
