Word.ws English Dictionary

roll coal

roll coal verb: to emit sooty exhaust fumes from a modified (diesel) engine (fad among anti-environmentalist American truck drivers).

roll coal: to emit sooty exhaust fumes from a modified (diesel) engine (fad among anti-environmentalist...
Image: Salvatore Arnone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

roll coal (third-person singular simple present rolls coal, present participle rolling coal, simple past and past participle rolled coal)

  1. (US, slang) To emit sooty exhaust fumes from a modified (diesel) engine (fad among anti-environmentalist American truck drivers).
    • “Why don’t you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country,” Mr. Blue wrote.” I will continue to roll coal anytime I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars.”2016 September 4, Hiroko Tabuchi, “‘Rolling Coal’ in Diesel Trucks, to Rebel and Provoke”, in The New York Times
    • The light turned red, and Jerry peeled into the intersection, hooking left as an oversized pickup truck rolled coal and blared its horn at us. “Sorry!” I screamed for no good reason. Jerry skidded into another right turn.(Can we date this quote?), Tales from the Gas Station: Volume Three, Jack Townsend, page 59

Forms of roll coal

third-person singular presentrolls coal
present participlerolling coal
past participlerolled coal
pastrolled coal

Questions about roll coal

What does roll coal mean?
Roll coal means to emit sooty exhaust fumes from a modified (diesel) engine (fad among anti-environmentalist American truck drivers).
What part of speech is roll coal?
Roll coal is a verb.
What is the past tense of roll coal?
The past tense of roll coal is rolled coal.

Words near roll coal in the dictionary

  1. roll called
  2. roll calling
  3. roll calls
  4. roll cloud
  5. roll clouds
  6. roll coal
  7. roll container
  8. roll containers
  9. roll cumuli
  10. roll cumulus
  11. roll deep

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: roll coal (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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