ambulance
Pluralambulances
Verbambulances, ambulancing, ambulanced
Pluralambulances
Formsambulances, ambulancing, ambulanced
- 1An emergency vehicle equipped to carry seriously ill or injured people to a hospital.
The ambulance weaved through traffic with its sirens blaring.
Paramedics loaded the patient into the ambulance and sped off.
- 2To transport someone to a hospital or medical facility by ambulance.
The marines ambulanced the wounded soldier to a base hospital.
Crews will ambulance any casualties to the regional trauma center.
Note
A verb made straight from the noun, and it always takes a direct object: you ambulance a patient somewhere. Its forms are regular: ambulanced, ambulancing. The Western Surgical Association's Transactions of 1918 already uses it, arguing that ambulancing patients over cobble and rails should not be tolerated. Its natural home is clinical and logistical prose. In everyday speech, take by ambulance is more common.
- 3A mobile field hospital that travels with an army to treat the sick and wounded near a battlefield.
The regiment's ambulance followed the troops, ready to receive casualties from the day's battle.
Field surgeons operated continuously at the ambulance pitched just beyond artillery range.
Note
The word's original meaning lies here. French ambulance replaced hôpital ambulant, "moving hospital," and goes back to Latin ambulō, "to walk; to go about." What moved was the whole establishment of surgeons and supplies, not a single vehicle. In older military accounts, then, an ambulance can be a place where surgeons operate. Readers should not picture the emergency vehicle when they meet it there.
- 4A vehicle used to transport dead people, typically to a mortuary.
After the coroner finished, the ambulance carried the remains to the mortuary.
The undertaker waited for the ambulance to arrive and remove the body.
Note
In British usage the same vehicle word reaches past the living to the dead, who are carried to a mortuary rather than a hospital. Because the bare word could suggest the emergency vehicle, the fuller name private ambulance makes the purpose clear. It is the safer choice in writing where the difference matters.
Less common meanings
- 5A stretcher or litter used to carry the sick or injured for medical transport.
Similarstretcher
Note
Before wheels took over the word, British usage could mean the litter itself, carried by hand. The sense is obsolete, and the later vehicle meaning displaced it. Where it turns up in older British writing, think of bearers and poles. Today the only natural word for the thing is stretcher.
- 6A covered wagon, typically one fitted with an arched canvas cover and drawn by animals.
The officers' wives traveled across the territory in an ambulance drawn by four mules.
Dust trailed behind the ambulance as it rolled toward the fort.
Note
An obsolete American usage in which the word carried passengers rather than patients. It named a light covered wagon, often mule-drawn, in which army officers and their families crossed the western territories. In accounts of frontier forts, an ambulance carrying officers' wives is simply transport. Nothing in the word implies illness or injury there.
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Origin
Borrowed from French ambulance, which replaced hôpital ambulant ("moving hospital") using the suffix -ance, from Latin ambulō ("to walk; to go about").