the.com/wain
A wagon so old the language retired it but kept the name for stars.
means A large, open farm wagon, especially one drawn by horses or oxen — now an archaic or dialect word kept alive mostly in poetry and place-names.
from From Old English 'wægn,' the same ancestor that gave us 'wagon' (which English later re-borrowed from Dutch). It traces back to a Proto-Germanic root and ultimately the Indo-European root meaning 'to carry or convey' — a cousin of 'vehicle' and 'way.' It survives chiefly in 'Charles's Wain,' the old English name for the Plough or Big Dipper, imagined as a great wagon wheeling across the sky.
- sky job
- Charles's Wain is the old name for the Big Dipper
- painter's wagon
- Constable's Hay Wain hangs in London's National Gallery
- root word
- Same Germanic ancestor as the modern word wagon
- buried in names
- Survives in surnames like Wainwright, a cart-builder
- dead weight
- Now lives almost only in poetry and place-names
big dipper — asterism in ursa major constellation, 7 bright stars forming a wagon shape visible from northern hemisphere
plough — alternative name for the big dipper used in british astronomy, same 7-star pattern