trams

Noun

tram (plural trams)

1. (Australia, UK) A passenger vehicle for public use that runs on tracks in the road (called a streetcar or trolley in North America).
   • Lizzie and she got a dozen of large bottles and the loan of a basket and we got a currant pan and a half-pound of cooked ham in the shop next door and got on the tram for Whitehall.1981, Brendan Behan, edited by Peter Fallon, After the Wake: Twenty-one Prose Works including Previously Unpublished Material (Classic Irish Fiction Series), Dublin: The O'Brien Press, →ISBN

   Synonyms:

   streetcar, trolley

2. A similar vehicle for carrying materials.
   • Trams are a kind of sledge on which coals are brought from the place where they are hewn to the shaft. A tram has four wheels but a sledge is without wheels.1789, John Brand, History and Antiquities of the Town and County of Newcastle upon Tyne: Including an Account of the Coal Trade of that Place, volume II, London: White, →OCLC, page 681
3. (US) A people mover.
   • The game Half-Life, for example, begins with a movie in which Gordon Freeman, the player's avatar, takes a tram ride through the Black Mesa research complex while a voice explains why he is there.2013, Ernest Adams, “Storytelling”, in Fundamentals of Game Design, 3rd edition, [San Francisco, Calif.]: New Riders, →ISBN, page 215
4. (US) An aerial cable car.
   • It's possible that my family took the tram to Roosevelt Island at some point and the experience embedded itself deep into my imagination where it mixed with other flights of fancy (pun intended) of flying through a Gotham-like city like Batman.2014, Vivienne Gucwa, “Skylines”, in NY through the Lens, Cincinnati, Oh.: Print Books, →ISBN, page 129
5. (US) A train with wheels that runs on a road; a trackless train.
   • Taking advantage of the VIP Experience at Universal Studios provides a more intimate and authentic look at the studio than does the regular studio tram tour. […] The VIP Experience gets you off the tram and behind the scenes: into sound stages, prop warehouses, and production facilities and on the...2005, Jan Friedman, Eccentric California, Chalfont St. Peter, Buckinghamshire: Bradt Travel Guides, →ISBN, page 124
6. (UK, historical) A car on a horse railway or tramway (horse trams preceded electric trams).
   • The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved...1976 [1925], Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin”, in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, page 93

See all 14 meanings of tram