gear lever
1
3.6
- noun
- UK
:
palanca de cambios
- She shifted the gear lever into drive before merging onto the highway.
- gear lever to shift
Examples
-
Vaughan hooks his gear lever into reverse.
Fiction book (1996) -
Gingerly, I reached for the gear lever to shift into reverse, but before I could get hold of it, the car gave a sickening shudder and tilted crazily toward the churning torrent.
Fiction book (2001) -
You see the gear lever here?
-
You have these buttons that are big and simple and this gear lever that you just kind of move into gear.
-
Now you can see the usual PRND in this gear lever and below that you have eco.
-
One of those gears, man at the back, and there's little gear levers in the square sections on the rear.
-
An extension on the floor-mounted gear lever rises laterally, giving way to a vertical wing of chromium metal molded into the reverse of a driver's palm.
Fiction book (1996) -
To change gears smoothly, you need to move the gear lever gently.
-
The gear lever was stuck, making it difficult to switch from park to reverse.
Synonyms
8
6.5
A lever that changes gears in a car or bike
6
4.2
A lever in a car that you move to change how fast the wheels turn
1
4.2
A lever in a car that you move by hand to change gears
How Manual
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a device to change gears' is directly and transparently built from 'gear' (mechanical gear/gearbox part) + 'lever' (a bar used to apply force or operate a mechanism). This straightforward compounding of mechanical terms follows common noun-noun formation and is cross-linguistically regular, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents would readily infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Gear lever comes from the simple picture of a long handle called a lever that you move to change the car's gears. Early cars used a long stick that moved the gears inside the car, so the name stayed. That's why it means 'the control you use to change gears'.