Word.ws English Dictionary

handcar

handcar noun: a light railroad car propelled by a hand-operated pumping mechanism.

handcar: a light railroad car propelled by a hand-operated pumping mechanism
Image: HarshLight from San Jose, CA, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

handcar (plural handcars)

  1. A light railroad car propelled by a hand-operated pumping mechanism
    • Yours goes up and mine goes down / and then we do it the other way around. / Don't you give me that sigh, cause if we can't see eye-to-eye / then our missions will be always filled with strife, / cause a handcar is a metaphor for life.2013 March 1, “Sidetracked”, in Phineas and Ferb, season 4, episode 5, spoken by Agent Lyla (Samantha Bee)
    • A small handcar rested on the tracks, its iron pump waiting for a human touch to animate it.2016, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, Fleet (2017), page 306

Synonyms of handcar

Forms of handcar

pluralhandcars

Origin of handcar

From hand + car.

Questions about handcar

What does handcar mean?
Handcar means a light railroad car propelled by a hand-operated pumping mechanism.
What part of speech is handcar?
Handcar is a noun.
What is the plural of handcar?
The plural of handcar is handcars.

Words near handcar in the dictionary

  1. handbuilding
  2. handbuilt
  3. handcam
  4. handcannon
  5. handcannons
  6. handcar
  7. handcarchief
  8. handcard
  9. handcards
  10. handcare
  11. handcarried

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: handcar (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-handcar.wav.

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