Word.ws English Dictionary

trap car

trap car noun: a vehicle used by law enforcement agencies as bait to capture car thieves or thieves who steal items from cars.

Noun

trap car (plural trap cars)

  1. A vehicle used by law enforcement agencies as bait to capture car thieves or thieves who steal items from cars.
  2. A vehicle infused with very dark tints in order to evade capture or scrutiny.
  3. A railroad car used for much smaller shipments usually within terminal or city limits.
    Synonyms:
    ferry car
  4. A passenger vehicle used for drug smuggling, having a sophisticated design that reveals “stash spots” for drugs only when certain functions of the vehicle are performed simultaneously or in sequence.
    • But a look inside the trunk reveals one of the reasons—a sheet of boilerplate steel mounted at the forward wall. Goff recognizes this setup. It's what they call a "trap car."2000, Mike Gray, Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, page 10
    • He got him another trap car Chevy.2000, Marlon Wilson, Shorty Four, page 13

Examples of trap car in a sentence

  • The crisp notes travel from local dealers to Mexican distributors and float south over the border in a trap car.2012, Ioan Grillo, El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels, page 151:
  • The former undercover agent recalled, "we brought up an especially good batch of marijuana from a seizure in Texas, and we showed the targets the dope in a trap car” with secret compartments.2021, Hans Nelen, Dina Siegel, Contemporary Organized Crime, page 244:

Synonyms of trap car

Forms of trap car

pluraltrap cars

Questions about trap car

What does trap car mean?
Trap car means a vehicle used by law enforcement agencies as bait to capture car thieves or thieves who steal items from cars.
How do you use trap car in a sentence?
The crisp notes travel from local dealers to Mexican distributors and float south over the border in a trap car.
What part of speech is trap car?
Trap car is a noun.
What is the plural of trap car?
The plural of trap car is trap cars.

Words near trap car in the dictionary

  1. Traores
  2. trap
  3. trap and trace
  4. trap ball
  5. trap bar
  6. trap car
  7. trap cars
  8. trap crop
  9. trap cropping
  10. trap crops
  11. trap door

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: trap 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.

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