Caboose - Etymology

Etymology

The first written evidence of the usage of "caboose" in a railroad context appeared in 1859 (not 1861, as cited by the Online Etymology Dictionary), as part of court records in conjunction with a lawsuit filed against the New York and Harlem Railway. This suggests "caboose" was probably in circulation among North American railroaders well before the mid-19th century.

Railroad historian David L. Joslyn (a retired Southern Pacific Railroad draftsman) has connected "caboose" to kabhuis, a Middle Dutch word referring to the compartment on a sailing ship's main deck in which meals were prepared. Kabhuis is believed to have entered the Dutch language circa 1747 as a derivation of the obsolete Low German word Kabhuse, which also described a cabin erected on a ship's main deck. However, further research indicates this relationship was more indirect than that described by Joslyn.

Eighteenth century French naval records make reference to a cambose or camboose, which described the food preparation cabin on a ship's main deck, as well as the range within. The latter sense apparently entered American naval terminology around time of the construction of the USS Constitution, whose wood-burning food preparation stove is officially referred to as the camboose. These nautical usages are now obsolete: camboose and kabhuis became the galley when meal preparation was moved below deck, camboose, the stove, became the galley range, and kabhuis the cookshack morphed into kombuis, which means kitchen in Afrikaans and Dutch.

It is likely that camboose was borrowed by American sailors who had come into contact with their French counterparts during the American Revolution (recall that France was an ally and provided crucial naval support during the conflict). A New English Dictionary citation from the 1940s indicates camboose entered English language literature in a New York Chronicle article from 1805 describing a New England shipwreck, in which it was reported that " William Duncan drifted aboard the canboose ." From this, it could be concluded that camboose was part of American English by the time the first railroads were constructed. As the first cabooses were wooden shanties erected on flat cars (as early as the 1830s,) they would have resembled the cook shack on the (relatively flat) deck of a ship, explaining the adoption and subsequent corruption of the nautical term.

There is some disagreement on what constitutes the proper plural form of the word "caboose". Similar words, like goose (pluralized as "geese"), and moose (pluralized as "moose", no change) point to the reason for the difficulty in coming to a consensus. The most common pluralization of caboose is "cabooses", with some arguing that this is incorrect, and, as with the word moose, it should stay the same in plural form—that is, "caboose" should represent one or many. A less-seriously used pluralization of the word is "cabeese", following the pluralization rule for the word goose, which is geese. This particular form is almost universally used in an attempt at humor.

It was common for railroads to officially refer to cabooses as "cabin cars".