🚗 Car decoration ✈️ Aircraft stabilizer 🐟 Fish's rear fin

tail fin

1 6.4

A decorative metal piece on a car's rear that looks like a small wing

noun
/teɪl fɪn/

Archaic

: aleta trasera

The cars on the road appeared to be from a different era, wide bodies with tail fins and brake lights that slanted like eyebrows.
chrome-laden tail fins

Examples

I liked tail fins on cars; I liked the older songs better," Linda smiled at him while they walked to the front door of the Harbor Light.

Fiction book (1993)
The classic car show featured numerous vintage models with shiny chrome and eye-catching tail fins.
Had I somehow slipped through time to 1958 and the year of the Edsel and tail fins?

Blog text (34)
Many mid-century automobiles were designed with sleek tail fins that enhanced their aerodynamic appearance.
Restoring the old Cadillac involved fixing its iconic tail fins, a signature element of its distinctive style.

Synonyms

fin

vstail fin

Archaic

9 7.3

A decorative metal piece on the back of some old cars

is a single decorative projection rather than one of a matched pair

tailfin

vstail fin

Archaic

1 6.5

A pointed upright part at the back of some cars popular in the 1950s

is the same feature but written as two separate words

Surface Forms

tail fin singular

tail fins plural

Morphology

tail + fin

The meaning 'the fin at the tail of an aircraft' is directly derivable from combining 'tail' (rear part) with 'fin' (an appendage), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer it denotes an appendage at the rear used for stability. This noun–noun compounding follows a common, compositional pattern and the extension of 'fin' to non‑aquatic appendages is conceptually transparent across languages.

Etymology

Tail fin Car makers in the 1950s copied tall airplane and rocket tails and added small fins above the rear fenders to make cars look fast, so the name mixes tail and fin to mean a decorative projection at the back of a car.