life car
life car noun: a watertight boat or box, travelling on a line from a wrecked vessel to the shore, used to haul people through the waves in a rescue.
Noun
life car (plural life cars)
- A watertight boat or box, travelling on a line from a wrecked vessel to the shore, used to haul people through the waves in a rescue.
- From this hawser the breeches-buoy or life-car is suspended and drawn between the ship and shore of the endless whip-line. The life-car can also be drawn like a boat between ship and shore without the use of a hawser. The breeches-buoy is a cork life-buoy to which is attached a pair of short canvas...1911, Robert M. Ballantyne, Charles Dibdin and Alfred T. Thorson, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Life-boat and Life-saving Service
- This was no explanation to the girls until Tom Cameron came running back from the house and announced that the crew were going to try to reach the schooner with a line.
"They'll try to save them with the breeches buoy," he said. "They've got a life-car here; but they never use that thing nowadays...1913, Alice B. Emerson, Ruth Fielding at Lighthouse Point, Chapter 9
Forms of life car
| plural | life cars |
|---|---|
| alternative form | lifecar |
| alternative form | life-car |
Questions about life car
- What does life car mean?
- Life car means a watertight boat or box, travelling on a line from a wrecked vessel to the shore, used to haul people through the waves in a rescue.
- What part of speech is life car?
- Life car is a noun.
- What is the plural of life car?
- The plural of life car is life cars.
Words near life car in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: life car (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-life car.wav.
Cite this entry: “life car.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/life_car. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.