Good Morning colonial chum Geoff, and the List,
>A question to our British list members: what is the origin of the word
>"lorry". Is it a unique British noun coined to describe some sort of
>horse-drawn goods-wagon of times past, or something taken from
someone's
>name? Or something more arcane?
>
The usage is peculiar to the UK only according to the Concise Oxford
Dictionary which is the standard modern work and a fairly weighty tome,
but without attending the reference library to view the massive full
Oxford dic., it says:
"Motor truck for the transportation of goods, troops etc., long, flat,
low wagon; truck used on tramways and railways. 19th century north
English origin perhaps from the name Laurie."
Domestically, lorry is in every-day use but the military always use the
term truck and the haulage industry refer to either trucks or wagons.
>In regards to WW2 vehicles, lorries were designated by a War Department
>number beginning with the letter "L" ["CL" for Canadian vehicles], and
>were generally vehicles 30 cwt and larger. Those vehicles designated as
>'trucks' carried the prefix of "Z" ["CZ"] and were 8cwt and 15cwt.
>
At the risk of veering off-topic and teaching some of you to suck eggs
there may be many however somewhat bemused by the old nomenclature.
The term cwt is said as "hundredweight" from the Roman c = 100, wt is
then obvious, it used to refer to the very old usage of 100lbs/1cwt. and
so the 2000lb short ton.
You can safely assume from 1900 to metrication in the 70's, for land
going usage, that any reference to the ton is in fact always the long
ton of 2240lbs thus making the cwt as 112lbs. and this would always be
the case for W.W.II vehicles.
Further sub-divisions in common usage were Quarters (1/4 cwt or 28lbs)
and Stones of 14lbs. commercial vehicles pre and post war were required
by law to display their gross and tare weights sign-written on the body
and it took up a fair area properly displayed as: x-tons. y-cwt.
z-qtrs. v-st. n-lbs.
(The nightmarish stuff of school mathematics, manually doing division
and multiplication with every factor in a different base; as I well
remember.)
The W.W.II designations as seen on vehicles were L for 1 ton and up, Z
for under 1 ton.
Today the metric tonne (but spoken like ton) is universally applied
being 2200lbs/1000kg, the cwt is defunct being simply 50kg, quarters
extinct, but stones still in common use for personal body weight
domestically.
Apologies for rambling on,
Richard
(Southampton UK)
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