fire engine

A vehicle used by firefighters to pump water to fight a fire. Typically, a fire engine carries a supply of water and has the ability to connect to an external water supply.

Noun

  1. A vehicle used by firefighters to pump water to fight a fire. Typically, a fire engine carries a supply of water and has the ability to connect to an external water supply.
    • Near-synonyms: fire truck (usually synonymous in current usage); fire appliance; water engine (formerly synonymous)
    • Heading home from a party, two hipsters, completely stoned, pause to snuggle on a park bench. A fire engine roars by, bells clanging, sirens screaming. The boy flips. “Solid, doll,” he murmurs, “they’re playing our...
    • A fire aboard TfW 175007, working a Holyhead-Cardiff Central service on February 8, closed the A483 road while five fire engines from Wrexham, Deeside, and Cheshire attended the scene. - 2023 March 22, “Network News:...

    Synonyms: fire truck fire appliance water engine

  2. A steam engine.
    • A plan somewhat similar to this was adopted by Smeaton in the boiler of his portable fire engine. - 1844, William Pole, A Treatise on the Cornish Pumping Engine - Parts 1-3, page 110:
    • In the same year a very compact arrangement for a stationary fire engine was described by Mr. Wm. Baddeley, in which he proposed it should be worked like a capstan by means of handspikes, and it could be bolted down to...
    • This discovery gave a great impulse to mechanical ingenuity, and many schemes were contrived to make this new agent available as a motive power; but the first of these projects that appears to have been of any avail was...

Forms

fire engines

Derived

fire engine red