transport etymology 9 - coach

When we did a little tour around Hungary not so long ago, our guide asked us what English words had come from Hungarian. The obvious one, of course, is goulash (gulyás) but nothing else came to mind.

One word that is originally from Hungarian, filtered via German and then French, is coach.

Hungarian kocsi (pronounced "kotshi") appeared in the 15th century: Kocs was the village where it was first made. In English coach, meaning a large kind of carriage, appeared in the 1550s from French coche, from German kotsche (nowadays Kutsche). It was applied to railway cars in 1866 and to buses in the early 20th century. The American adjective meaning "economy" class is from 1949. In NZ as in America "bus" is used for both metropolitan and longer distance buses, but in the UK "coach" is always used for the latter, maybe to imply that you get more comfortable interiors.