wagon

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A heavier four-wheeled (normally horse-drawn) vehicle designed to carry goods (or sometimes people).

   These wagons and pack-mules will include transportation for all personal baggage, mess chests, cooking utensils, desks, papers, &c.

2. 2
   noun

   Abbreviation of toy wagon; A child's riding toy, with the same structure as a wagon (sense 1), pulled or steered by a long handle attached to the front.

   […] [Debra] Van Ausdale transcribes an exchange among two white girls (both aged four) and one Asian girl (age three) who are playing with a wagon. One of the white girls is pulling the other children. When the wagon gets stuck the Asian girl jumps out to help pull. The white girl responds, "No, no. You can't pull this wagon. Only white Americans can pull this wagon." […] Here, a four-year-old is using a construction that joins race and perceptions of citizenship to exclude in her play.

3. 3
   noun

   A vehicle (wagon) designed to transport goods or people on railway.

   Various methods have been suggested for effecting this transfer by a bodily removal of whole wagons; either by lifting the bodies from one set of wheels to another, or transferring the wagons, wheels and all, to some kind of truck; but practically these projects wholly fail. […] It is calculated that to bring a train of fifty wagons under the machine, one by one, a horse would have to traverse five miles and a half.

4. 4
   noun

   Ellipsis of dinner wagon (“set of light shelves mounted on castors so that it can be pushed around a dining room and used for serving”).

   With the important exception of religious myths, the hybridized and grafted Marxist myths are like whole-dessert wagons with almost everybody's favorite sweets—all of them with no calories (costs) and chock-full of nutrients (benefits) guaranteeing everything good for almost everyone, except the few rich; yet all of them also are enflamed by fears and hatreds of the mythical Satans conspiring to steal the dessert wagon and immiserate all the rest of us.

5. 5
   noun

   Ellipsis of paddy wagon (“police van for transporting prisoners”).

   I began as a patrol officer, working the wagon, squad car, and three-wheelers until 1963, when I took the detective exam.

6. 6
   noun

   Ellipsis of station wagon (“type of automobile”); (occasionally, loosely) any car, van, or light truck.

   The woman had been photographed in the driver's seat of a late-model Jeep wagon; walking across what appeared to be a large parking lot; inside her kitchen and her bedroom, blissfully unaware that her privacy was being invaded by binoculars and telephoto lenses in the hands of a slob like Thigpen.

7. 7
   noun

   Term of abuse.

   […] I was in a field last week with Ursula Brogan behind the football pitch. We followed Cissy Caffery there and two boys from the secondary. She’s a wagon. She did it with them one after the other, and we watched.

8. 8
   verb

   To load into a wagon in preparation for transportation; to transport by means of a wagon.

   The ore is firſt waggoned to the river, a quarter of a mile, then laden on board of canoes, and carried acroſs the river, which is there about 200 yards wide, and then again taken into waggons and carried to he furnace.

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle Dutch wagen, from Old Dutch *wagan, from Proto-West Germanic *wagn, from Proto-Germanic *wagnaz (“wagon”), from Proto-Indo-European *weǵʰ- (“to transport”). Generally displaced native cognate wain, from Old English wæġn, of which it is a doublet. Related also to way, weigh. Sense 8 (“woman of loose morals; obnoxious woman”) is probably a derogatory and jocular reference to a woman being “ridden”, that is, mounted for the purpose of sexual intercourse. The verb is derived from the noun.