carburetor
Americannoun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of carburetor
Explanation
A carburetor is the part of a car's engine that combines gas vapors and air in a way that keeps things running. Many vehicles, including some small airplanes, have carburetors. Newer cars, which tend to have fuel injected engines, no longer have carburetors, but there are still plenty of cars and trucks on the road that do. An engine with a carburetor is called an internal combustion engine, and it relies on the carburetor to mix fuel and air in the right proportion. The word itself comes from the now-obsolete carburet, "combine or charge with a hydrocarbon."
Vocabulary lists containing carburetor
Automobiles
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Commonly Misspelled Words, List 4
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Fish in a Tree
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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:
One memory stood out among the others: Watching Dale Earnhardt tinker with his carburetor under the hood of his car.
From Washington Times ● Jul. 17, 2023
If you didn’t know a carburetor from a crankshaft, you could never be sure you weren’t getting ripped off.
From Washington Post ● May 24, 2022
May the odds be ever in your carburetor.
From The Verge ● Apr. 21, 2022
Let the machine run for about five minutes to make sure the stabilizer gets to the carburetor.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 17, 2021
Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors—the carburetor, the distributor, the intake manifold—and connecting them to the engine block.
From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides
Brian Hohmann has spent decades adapting to changes in automotive technology, from attending a school to fix carburetors — now an obsolete technology — to learning how to program.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 23, 2022
He furthered his automotive education, as he rebuilt carburetors, performed tuneups and ran a dynamometer that measured the rear-wheel horsepower of customers’ cars.
From New York Times ● Feb. 10, 2022
He lifted engines and carburetors in the garage where he worked on cars, but in this moment, he couldn’t pull himself up from the ground.
From Washington Times ● Feb. 7, 2021
"From greasy carburetors to plants in the same space," Resnick observes.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 1, 2018
He often prowled through junkyards touching old cars and buying old alternators and carburetors just for the joy of cleaning them up and making them work again.
From "Walk Two Moons" by Sharon Creech
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.
