wagon

Etymology

Borrowed from Dutch wagen, from Middle Dutch wagen, from Old Dutch *wagan, from Proto-West Germanic *wagn, from Proto-Germanic *wagnaz (“wagon”), from Proto-Indo-European *woǵʰnos (“wagon, primitive carriage”), from *weǵʰ- (“to transport”). Cognate with Danish vogn (“wagon”), German Wagen (“vehicle; wagon”), Saterland Frisian Woain (“wagon”), West Frisian wein (“wagon”), Swedish vagn (“wagon”). Doublet of wain (inherited from Old English wæġn) and related also to way, weigh. Sense 7 (“woman of loose morals; obnoxious woman”) is probably a derogatory and jocular reference to a woman being “ridden”, that is, mounted for the purpose of sexual intercourse. The verb is derived from the noun.

noun

1. A heavier four-wheeled (normally horse-drawn) vehicle designed to carry goods (or sometimes people).
   These wagons and pack-mules will include transportation for all personal baggage, mess chests, cooking utensils, desks, papers, &c. 28 June 1864, T. S. Bowers (Assistant Adjutant General), “No. 51. [Special Orders No. 44.]”, in Report of the Quartermaster General of the United States Army to the Secretary of War, for the Year Ending June 30, 1865, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, published 1865, →OCLC, paragraph 6, page 189
   The first waggon was loaded, and moved a few yards along the quay, and the second took its place. There was an order and swiftness over the work that told of a careful preparation. The third waggon took the place of the second and the work of loading it went even faster. Then, at a shout from the Grocer, the loaders threw off their slings, took every man of them a cudgel from beneath his smock, and formed themselves as a guard about the waggons that went away quickly along the quay on their way inland. 1922 February, H. Harrison, “Plot and Counterplot: A Tale of the Smuggling Canker in the Days Following the Battle of Waterloo”, in The Boy’s Own Paper, volume XLV, part 4, London: “Boy’s Own Paper” Office,[…], →OCLC, chapter II, page 262, column 1
   It was five miles or more from Maggot's lane to the Ferry. The hobbits wrapped themselves up, but their ears were strained for any sound above the creak of the wheels and the slow clop of the ponies' hoofs. The waggon seemed slower than a snail to Frodo. 1954, J[ohn] R[onald] R[euel] Tolkien, “A Short Cut to Mushrooms”, in The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings, London: George Allen & Unwin, →OCLC, page 105; republished Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
   On the sixteenth-century farm all the heavy hauling of lime or marl for the fields, gravel for the lanes, timber for the fences and 'coals or other necessary fuel fetched far off' had to be done as far as possible in the summer while the roads were still dry and firm. […] About the end of October the prudent farmer, like Best of Elmswell near Driffield, laid up his waggon, and sent his corn to market during the winter months on a string of eight pack-horses, tied head to tail, with a couple of men to 'guide the pokes'. 1967, J. Crofts, “The Weather”, in Packhorse, Waggon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications under the Tudors and Stuarts (Studies in Social History), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; reprinted as Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2007, page 9
2. Abbreviation of toy wagon; A child's riding toy, with the same structure as a wagon (sense 1), pulled or steered by a long handle attached to the front.
   […] [Debra] Van Ausdale transcribes an exchange among two white girls (both aged four) and one Asian girl (age three) who are playing with a wagon. One of the white girls is pulling the other children. When the wagon gets stuck the Asian girl jumps out to help pull. The white girl responds, "No, no. You can't pull this wagon. Only white Americans can pull this wagon." […] Here, a four-year-old is using a construction that joins race and perceptions of citizenship to exclude in her play. 2017, Jennifer Harvey, “From Color-blindness to Race-conscious Parenting”, in Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America, Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press
   In all placs and ages children have played with things, some found by children, some fabricated by them, and some provided by parents or other adults. Today these might include a just-emptied rolled-oats carton salvaged from the kitchen, a knocked together wooden wagon set on cast-off baby buggy wheels, or a gaudy heavy plastic gm set of Chinese manufacture. 2015, Carroll Pursell, “Toys for Girls and Boys”, in From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, page 5
3. (rail transport) A vehicle (wagon) designed to transport goods or people on railway.
   Various methods have been suggested for effecting this transfer by a bodily removal of whole wagons; either by lifting the bodies from one set of wheels to another, or transferring the wagons, wheels and all, to some kind of truck; but practically these projects wholly fail. […] It is calculated that to bring a train of fifty wagons under the machine, one by one, a horse would have to traverse five miles and a half. 1846, Thornton [Leigh] Hunt, Unity of the Iron Network: Showing how the Last Argument for the Break of Gauge, Competition, is at Variance with the True Interests of the Public, 2nd edition, London: Smith, Elder and Co.,[…], →OCLC, page 6
   The total weight of goods and minerals loaded into wagons on the railways of the United Kingdom during the year 1913, the last complete period of working under normal conditions before the outbreak of war, was 372,037,000 tons, of which 299,129,000 tons, or 80.41 per cent., consisting of coal and minerals. 21 June 1918, H. Kelway-Bamber, “Coal and Mineral Traffic on the Railways of the United Kingdom”, in The Engineer, volume CXXV, number 3260, London: Office for publication and advertisements,[…], →ISSN, →OCLC, page 546, column 2
4. Short for dinner wagon (“set of light shelves mounted on castors so that it can be pushed around a dining room and used for serving”).
   With the important exception of religious myths, the hybridized and grafted Marxist myths are like whole-dessert wagons with almost everybody's favorite sweets—all of them with no calories (costs) and chock-full of nutrients (benefits) guaranteeing everything good for almost everyone, except the few rich; yet all of them also are enflamed by fears and hatreds of the mythical Satans conspiring to steal the dessert wagon and immiserate all the rest of us. 1989, Jack D. Douglas, “The Explosion of Modern Millennialism”, in The Myth of the Welfare State, New Brunswick, N.J., London: Transaction Publishers, published 1991 (paperback reprint), page 244
   The waiters wore red jackets with black lapels, in summer white jackets with green lapels. There was a roast beef wagon. A pastry section in the huge kitchen. 2011, David [Kinder] Levy, “Adieu Comrade, Said the Fat Lady: Traitor, Pariah, Ex-citizen …”, in Stalin’s Man in Canada: Fred Rose and Soviet Espionage, New York, N.Y.: Enigma Books
5. (slang) Short for paddy wagon (“police van for transporting prisoners”).
   I began as a patrol officer, working the wagon, squad car, and three-wheelers until 1963, when I took the detective exam. 2009, Hugh Holton, The Thin Black Line: True Stories by Black Law Enforcement Officers Policing America’s Meanest Streets (A Forge Book), New York, N.Y.: Tom Doherty Associates
   I changed into civies and took the two prisoners along with their fingerprints in a patrol wagon along with PTL. Howell of the Sixty-First and a Sixtieth Precinct officer. […] Sometime during the trip, in the confines of the Sixty-Sixth Precinct, a driver started beeping her horn, saying someone had jumped out of the back of the PW. The wagon driver stopped, I ran to the back and saw that my two prisoners were not in the patrol wagon. 2009, John Moran, U.F. 16: a.k.a. Nothing to Report, [Bloomington, Ind.]: Xlibris, pages 66–67
6. (chiefly Australia, US, slang) Short for station wagon (“type of car in which the roof extends rearward to produce an enclosed area in the position of and serving the function of the boot (trunk)”); (by extension) a sport utility vehicle (SUV); any car.
   The woman had been photographed in the driver's seat of a late-model Jeep wagon; walking across what appeared to be a large parking lot; inside her kitchen and her bedroom, blissfully unaware that her privacy was being invaded by binoculars and telephoto lenses in the hands of a slob like Thigpen. 2002 October, Sandra Brown, The Crush, New York, N.Y.: Warner Books; republished New York, N.Y.: Grand Central Publishing, 2017
7. (Ireland, slang, derogatory, dated) A woman of loose morals, a promiscuous woman, a slapper; (by extension) a woman regarded as obnoxious; a bitch, a cow.
   […] I was in a field last week with Ursula Brogan behind the football pitch. We followed Cissy Caffery there and two boys from the secondary. She’s a wagon. She did it with them one after the other, and we watched. 1985, Eugene McCabe, “Roma”, in Heaven Lies about Us: Stories, 1st U.S. edition, New York, N.Y., London: Bloomsbury, published 2004, page 57
   —Don’t know. —She hates us. It’s prob’ly cos Daddy called her a wagon at tha’ meetin’. / Sharon laughed. She got out of bed. / —He didn’t really call Miss O’Keefe a wagon, she told Tracy. —He was only messin’ with yeh. 1990, Roddy Doyle, The Snapper, London: Secker and Warburg; republished New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1992, pages 30–31
   Well fuck yeh, yeh stuck-up little wagon. 1998, Neville Thompson, Two Birds/One Stoned, Dublin: Poolbeg, page 8
8. (mathematics) A kind of prefix used in de Bruijn notation.
9. (slang) Buttocks.

verb

1. (transitive, chiefly US) To load into a wagon in preparation for transportation; to transport by means of a wagon.
   The ore is firſt waggoned to the river, a quarter of a mile, then laden on board of canoes, and carried acroſs the river, which is there about 200 yards wide, and then again taken into waggons and carried to he furnace. 1781–1782, Thomas Jefferson, “Query VI. A Notice of the Mines and Other Subterraneous Riches; Its Trees, Plants, Fruits, &c.”, in Notes on the State of Virginia.[…], London: Printed for John Stockdale,[…], published 1787, →OCLC, page 39
   Bar iron, of the first quality; pig metal and castings, of various denominations; wheat in large quantities; other grain, whiskey, gin, clover-seed, flax-seed, beeswax, butter et cetera, are wagoned to these points, and others on the streams mentioned, and taken down the Susquehanna. 1822, “Bellefonte and Philipsburg Turnpike Road Company”, in Documents, Accompanying the Report of the Committee, on Roads, Bridges and Inland Navigation, Read in the Senate of Pennsylvania, on the 23d of March, 1822, Harrisburg, Pa.: C. Mowry, printer, →OCLC, paragraph 35, page 15
   In compliance with the positive injunction of the 4th section of the internal improvement act of 1836, which expressly declares that the canal shall be constructed and completed "to the Ohio river at Lawrenceburgh," and to exempt the opening trade from the expense and delay of wagoning to and from the river, as stated in the report of the board, the necessary steps were taken to connect the trade of the canal with the navigation of the river. 14 January 1840, N. Noble, “Report of the Board of Internal Improvements”, in Journal of the House of Representatives, at the Twenty-fourth Session of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana,[…], Indianapolis, Ind.: J. Livingston, printers, published 1839–1840, →OCLC, page 746
   Around 1903, smallpox and typhoid became so bad at the new Kirby mill town of Silsbee that the company doctor ordered wives to keep their children inside, lest they be infected by germs shaken from the pine coffins of disease victims wagoned through town on their way to the cemetery. 1998, Thad Sitton, James H. Conrad, “Panoramas”, in Nameless Towns: Texas Sawmill Communities, 1880–1942, Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, page 43
2. (intransitive, chiefly US) To travel in a wagon.
   [T]he toll was taken off freight on ninety miles of the canal between Huntingdon and Duncan's Island, and subsequently off passengers, to enable the companies to meet the unexpected and heavy expense necessarily incurred by staging and wagoning across the breach in the line. 1838, [Joseph Ritner], Message from the Governor to the General Assembly of Pennsylvania. Read in Senate, Dec. 27, 1838, Harrisburg, Pa.: Printed by E[manuel] Guyer, →OCLC, pages 13–14