Word.ws English Dictionary

train spotting

train spotting noun: the hobby of collecting the numbers and names of locomotives seen at railway stations and other vantage points.

Noun

train spotting (uncountable)

  1. The hobby of collecting the numbers and names of locomotives seen at railway stations and other vantage points.
    • One of my friends, the one who wept, did vow he'd never visit a bird observatory again and went back to train-spotting.1983, Bill Oddie, Gone Birding, London: Methuen, page 108
  2. The obsessive following of any minority interest or hobby.
    • […] trainspotting mentality that thrives on the minutiae of whatever field with little regard for any contextual relevance such detail may have to the wider picture.2001, International Record Review, volume 2, page 92

Forms of train spotting

alternative formtrainspotting

Questions about train spotting

What does train spotting mean?
Train spotting means the hobby of collecting the numbers and names of locomotives seen at railway stations and other vantage points.
What part of speech is train spotting?
Train spotting is a noun.

Words near train spotting in the dictionary

  1. train shed
  2. train sheds
  3. train sickness
  4. train spotter
  5. train spotters
  6. train spotting
  7. train station
  8. train stations
  9. train stop
  10. train stops
  11. train surf

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: train spotting (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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