garage

noun

1. A building or indoor space in which to park or keep a motor vehicle.
2. A commercial establishment where cars are repaired, serviced, or parked.

transitive verb ga·raged, ga·rag·ing, ga·rag·es

Origin:

Origin: French

Origin: , from garer, to shelter

Origin: , from Old French garer, guerrer

Origin: , of Germanic origin; see wer-⁴ in Indo-European roots

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Related Forms:

• ga·rageˈa·ble adjective

Word History: It is difficult today to envision a world without garages or a language without the word garage. However, the word probably did not exist before the 19th century and certainly not before the 18th; possibly the thing itself did not exist before the end of the 19th century. Our word is a direct borrowing of French garage, which is first recorded in 1802 in the sense “place where one docks.” The verb garer, from which garage was derived, originally meant “to put merchandise under shelter,” then “to moor a boat,” and then “to put a vehicle into a place for safekeeping,” that is, a garage, a sense first recorded in French in 1901. English almost immediately borrowed this French word, the first instance being found in 1902.