Word.ws English Dictionary

all-wheel drive

all-wheel drive noun: a wheeled vehicle with a drivetrain that allows all wheels to receive torque from the engine simultaneously, particularly where power is directed to the wheels with the best contact with the ground.

Noun

all-wheel drive (countable and uncountable, plural all-wheel drives)

  1. A wheeled vehicle with a drivetrain that allows all wheels to receive torque from the engine simultaneously, particularly where power is directed to the wheels with the best contact with the ground.
    • The brave German car's all-wheel drive tackled and spun through almost eight inches of loosely plowed snow.2012, L.B. Gregg, Men of Smithfield: Mark and Tony, page 123
    • So BMW has conjured a tweener — a roomier hatchback on platform shoes, with standard all-wheel drive — to attract customers who crave the 3 Series’ performance but need more utility to close the deal.2014 February 21, Lawrence Ulrich, “Get Your $50,000 Hatchback Here”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 22 Feb 2014

Forms of all-wheel drive

pluralall-wheel drives

Questions about all-wheel drive

What does all-wheel drive mean?
All-wheel drive means a wheeled vehicle with a drivetrain that allows all wheels to receive torque from the engine simultaneously, particularly where power is directed to the wheels with the best contact with the ground.
What part of speech is all-wheel drive?
All-wheel drive is a noun.
What is the plural of all-wheel drive?
The plural of all-wheel drive is all-wheel drives.

Words near all-wheel drive in the dictionary

  1. all-weather tires
  2. all-weather tyre
  3. all-weather tyres
  4. all-welded
  5. all-wheel
  6. all-wheel drive
  7. all-wheel drives
  8. all-woman
  9. all-year-round
  10. all-you-can-eat
  11. alla

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all-wheel drive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “all-wheel drive.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/all-wheel_drive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.