train
Definitions
General English
- noun an engine pulling a group of coaches on the railway
- verb to teach someone or an animal how to do a particular activity
- verb to become fit by practising for a sport
Agriculture
- verb to make plants, especially fruit trees and climbing plants, become a certain shape, by attaching shoots to supports or by pruning
Aviation
- noun a series of connected parts or wheels in machinery
- verb to teach a person a particular skill
Commerce
- verb to teach someone to do something
Construction
- A string of connected or unconnected vehicles or mobile equipment, such as a paving train, which consists of mobile machines to lay the various courses of a pavement.
Electronics
- A comparatively long line or sequence, such as a pulse train, or a large succession of events, components, or the like.
Information & Library Science
- verb to teach somebody the skills for a specific job
Military
- noun several railway carriages towed by a railway engine
- noun a column of vehicles carrying supplies, which accompanies a military force
- verb to point a gun
Slang
- noun an act of serial sexual intercourse. The word is usually used as part of a phrase such as ‘do a train (on someone)’.
Sports
- verb to prepare for a sporting competition, or prepare someone for a sporting competition, usually with a planned programme of appropriate physical exercises
Travel
- noun a set of coaches or wagons pulled by an engine along railway lines
- verb to teach somebody to do something, or to learn how to do something
Origin & History of “train”
A train is etymologically something that is ‘pulled’ along. The word was borrowed from Old French train, a derivative of the verb trahiner ‘drag’. And this in turn went back to vulgar Latin *tragināre, a derivative of Latin *tragere, a variant of trahere ‘pull’. It was first used in English for ‘delay’, from the notion of being ‘pulled’ back, and ‘part of a garment that trails behind’ dates from the 15th century. when steam locomotives pulling carriages were introduced in the 1820s, the combined vehicle was called a train of carriages; the simple term train is first recorded in 1835. The use of the verb train for ‘instruct, school’, which dates from the 16th century, evolved from an earlier ‘direct the course of growth of a plant’, which in turn went back to the original notion of ‘pulling’.
