motorman
Americannoun
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motormen
plural
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a person who operates or drives an electrically operated vehicle, as a streetcar or subway train.
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a person who operates a motor.
noun
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the driver of an electric train
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the operator of a motor
Gender
See -man.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of motorman
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
As a novice motorman he was once confused by the glaring beams; “red lights shone in front of me like the rifle barrels of an approaching platoon.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 10, 2026
Her husband Milton Deoth has been a sailor for over two decades and works as a motorman on MT Heroic Idun.
From BBC ● Dec. 22, 2022
“We are in the dust all the time, in the dark all the time,” said Tommy Turner, who makes about $24 an hour as a motorman driving a supply train through the mine.
From New York Times ● Apr. 2, 2022
Born in New York less than a mile from Broadway, McCann’s father was a subway motorman and her mother was a housewife.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 9, 2021
And the postman and the trolley motorman and half a dozen policemen from the Haarlem Police Headquarters just around the corner.
From "The Hiding Place" by Corrie ten Boom
Garth said that teenage friends of his would sometimes cajole motormen into letting them drive the streetcars into town from Glen Echo late at night.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 6, 2021
Timed signals not only indicate to motormen when they are speeding but automatically trip the brakes to stop a train that passes a red light without permission.
From New York Times ● Nov. 1, 2018
She greeted the train operator — they are no longer known as motormen — in the first car before taking her place in the booth in the sixth, in the middle of the train.
From New York Times ● May 25, 2013
San Francisco voters rejected a $7,950,000 appropriation to buy the 50-year-old Market Street Railway, partly because they thought the city fathers were not cut out to be gentlemen motormen.
From Time Magazine Archive
Yes, I might have wondered what you were giving the motormen for dinner.
From The Comings of Cousin Ann by Emma Speed Sampson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
