coach [M16th] Coaches get the name from a small town in Hungary. The first vehicles to be called coaches were horse-drawn carriages, which in the 16th and 17th centuries were usually royal state vehicles. The word comes from French coche, from Hungarian kocsi szekér, which means ‘wagon from Kocs’, the town of Kocs being renowned for making carriages and wagons. When other, similar forms of transport such as railway carriages and single-decker buses were invented, in the 1830s and 1920s respectively, they were called coaches too. The use of the word to refer to a tutor (and later a trainer in sport) is related to the above meanings, based on the idea that a tutor ‘carries’ or ‘drives’ a student through an examination.