Chauffer

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /ˈt͡ʃɔː.fə/

Definitions

1. A person who is employed to drive a private car for someone else
2. Someone hired to operate a car for a client, especially as a profession
3. An individual whose job is to drive a privately owned automobile for its owner

Etymology: The English word "chauffeur" is a French borrowing, and its surprising twist is that the French word it grew from meant "to heat." The verb "chauffer" comes from Old French "chaufer," which goes back to Latin "calefacere," literally "to make warm." In French, a "chauffeur" was originally the person who tended a fire, specifically the stoker who kept the furnace or boiler going, and the term later attached to the men who fed the fires of early steam engines. The word then moved from the engine room to the road. Early motor cars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were driven by their owners, but the job of steering one was given to a hired man who had once been a stoker, and the French name for the boiler-tender went with him. The English word was borrowed in this motoring sense, and the older meaning of heating survives only in its French ancestry and in the related word "chafe," which shares the same root.

Synonyms: driver, chauffeur