tramtram

The story

Early 16th century, borrowed from Scots, probably from Low German traam (‘tram, shaft of a barrow’), from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch trame (‘narrow shaft, beam’), said to be ultimately from a lost West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) word, probably from Proto-Germanic *drum (‘splinter, fragment’), from Proto-Indo-European *térmn̥ (‘peg, post, boundary’), cognate with Latin terminus. The popular derivation from the surname of the English pioneer tramway builder Benjamin Outram (1764–1805) is false: the term pre-dated him. The sense of a rail vehicle derives from tram-way, in its earliest sense meaning literally a log-covered road, but later applied to the earliest wooden railways, used for transporting coal in carts which came to be called "trams".