Carsickness

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Nausea, dizziness, and discomfort experienced by a passenger in a moving automobile, caused by the motion and visual disconnect between the body and surroundings
2. A queasy, dizzy feeling that affects some people riding in cars, resulting from the mismatch between the motion sensed by the inner ear and what the eyes perceive
3. The nauseous and disoriented sensation that occurs when traveling as a passenger in a vehicle, triggered by conflicting signals from the body's balance and vision systems

Etymology: Carsickness is a plain compound: "car" joined to "sickness," which means the nausea or dizziness a person feels while riding in a motor vehicle. The noun probably arose from "carsick," an adjective built the same way, with "-ness" added to turn it into a noun. Both parts are native English: "sickness" goes back to Old English "seocnes," and "car" in its modern sense of a motor vehicle is a later development of an older word for a wheeled carriage. The "car" element is worth a closer look. The English word descends from Latin "carrus," a wheeled vehicle, and it passed through Old French and Norman forms before reaching English. For centuries "car" meant a chariot or cart, and only in the late 19th century did it come to mean a self-propelled automobile. The compound therefore records a fairly recent technology attached to a very old word.

Synonyms: motion sickness