Royal coach returning to Buckingham Palace from the 2008 opening of parliament
18 August 2025
Coach is a word with two very different primary meanings. Etymologically coach is probably a single word, connected through use in university slang, although it is possible that the two meanings have different origins.
The older of the two meanings is that of a means of conveyance, originally a horse-drawn carriage. It is borrowed from the French coche in the mid sixteenth century. We see the word in a letter written by Philip Hoby to William Cecil, Lord Privy Seal to Elizabeth I, on 1 July 1556:
“I have bene often tolde of your coming to Bissham,” he says, “and what shulde staie youe I knowe not; but well am I assured that I have not heard one make so many promesses and performe so fewe. Peradventure my Lady staieth you, who, you will saie, cannot ride. Therto will I provide this remedy,—to sende her my coche: bicause she shall have the lesse travaile thither, and you, no excuse to make.”
As technology progressed, coach shifted from horse-drawn carriages to trains, then buses, and finally to airplanes. As it did so, it descended in social class, from conveyances for aristocrats to the common folk and riff raff.
The second sense of coach is that of an instructor, especially of a sports team. While on the surface there doesn’t seem to be a semantic connection with horse-drawn carriages, this sense probably comes out of that one via nineteenth-century university slang. We first see coach being used in university slang to mean a private tutor, hired to help a student pass his exams. We see it is an 1836 humorous set of fictional exam questions written by a certain Scriblerus Redivus (i.e., Edward Caswell). One question reads:
Trace analogically the application of the word coach, when it is said by a man, that he has “just taken such a coach to help him through his small.”
(Small here is student slang for the bachelor of arts exams.)
The underlying metaphor behind this slang sense is that of being carried through the exams. This same metaphor can be seen in various slang terms for crib sheets that were popular in the day: pony, horse, trot, and cab.
Within a decade coach was being used in sports contexts. We see it is a 13 May 1846 letter about Oxford University boat races printed in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle:
Amongst the most prominent we must notice the two first boats, viz, B. N. C. [Brasenose College] and Ch. Ch. [Christ Church]; […] Next on the list is Merton, and then comes Trinity, whose crew, under the keen supervision of that excellent “coach,” Noulton, have been making daily progress, and for whom we predict a brilliant career.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that this instructive sense of coach is “perhaps a variant of couch,” referring to that word’s use to mean a bedroom, especially one on board a ship. But the semantic change can be explained perfectly well without the addition of this other word into the mix.
Sources:
Aquaticus. “Oxford University Boat Races” (13 May 1846). Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 17 May 1846, 6/2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.
Hoby, Philip. Letter to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, 1 July 1556. In John William Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, vol. 1 of 2. London: Effingham Wilson, 1839, 483. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2022, coach, n. & adv.; 1893, couch, n.1; December 2006, pony, n.1 & adj.; 1899, horse, n.; 1915, trot, n.2; December 2019, cab, n.4.
Redivivus, Scriblerus (pseud. Edward Caswell. Pluck Examination Papers for Candidates at Oxford and Cambridge in 1836. Oxford: Henry Slatter, 1836, 26. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Photo credit: Robert Sharp, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.