Word.ws English Dictionary

train surf

train surf verb: to either stand on a the roof of a moving train and surf it like a wave, or to hang on and ride on the exterior of a train.

Verb

train surf (third-person singular simple present train surfs, present participle train surfing, simple past and past participle train surfed)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To either stand on a the roof of a moving train and surf it like a wave, or to hang on and ride on the exterior of a train.
    • 1998: Felicity Allen, Health Psychology: Theory and Practice - Adolescents may be rejected by their parents and feel so worthless that they want to do dangerous things such as ‘train-surfing'. [published in Australia]
    • 2006: Weekend Argus 14 May 2006 p.8. - An 18 year old boy was electrocuted yesterday while "train surfing" in Soweto yesterday, emergency services said. The boy had been standing on the roof of the train... According to emergency services, the boys wait until the train is travelling slowly and...

Forms of train surf

third-person singular presenttrain surfs
present participletrain surfing
past participletrain surfed
pasttrain surfed

Words formed from train surf

Questions about train surf

What does train surf mean?
Train surf means to either stand on a the roof of a moving train and surf it like a wave, or to hang on and ride on the exterior of a train.
What part of speech is train surf?
Train surf is a verb.
What is the past tense of train surf?
The past tense of train surf is train surfed.

Words near train surf in the dictionary

  1. train spotting
  2. train station
  3. train stations
  4. train stop
  5. train stops
  6. train surf
  7. train surfing
  8. train ticket
  9. train tickets
  10. train time
  11. train times

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: train surf (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)-Flame, not lame-train surf.wav.

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