car [ME] The earliest recorded uses of car, dating from the very start of the 14th century, referred to wheeled vehicles such as carts or wagons. The word came into English from Old French carre, based on Latin carrus ‘two-wheeled vehicle, wagon’, which probably had a Celtic source. Latin carro or carricare ‘to load’ also lie behind *career, carriage [LME], carry [LME], charge [ME], chariot [LME], and, via Spanish, cargo [M17th]. From the 16th to the 19th centuries in Britain car was mainly used in poetic or literary contexts to suggest a sense of splendour and solemnity, as in a funeral car. Railway carriages or trams were called cars in North America from the early 19th century. The first self-propelled road vehicle was a steam-driven carriage designed and built in France in 1769, but such vehicles were not called cars until the 1890s.