Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A four-wheeled carriage with front and back passenger seats that face each other and a roof in two sections that can be lowered or detached.
  • noun A style of automobile with a similar roof.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A two-seated carriage having the top in two parts, the rear part pivoted and arranged to fold down behind the back seat, and the front part admitting of removal.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A four-wheeled covered vehicle, the top of which is divided into two sections which can be let down, or thrown back, in such a manner as to make an open carriage.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A type of lightweight, four-wheeled carriage in which the front and back passenger seats face each other.
  • noun A style of automobile which is based around the idea of landau carriages.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a four-wheel covered carriage with a roof divided into two parts (front and back) that can be let down separately
  • noun Soviet physicist who worked on low temperature physics (1908-1968)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[After Landau, a city of southwest Germany.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Named after the German city of Landau where such carriages were first made.

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Examples

  • That when he got there, lo and behold! there was another carriage standing there at the gate, and not no common hack neither, but what he called a landau, with the top all throwed back, and a driver with a stove-pipe hat.

    A Special Providence 1995

  • That when he got there, lo and behold! there was another carriage standing there at the gate, and not no common hack neither, but what he called a landau, with the top all throwed back, and a driver with a stove-pipe hat.

    A Special Providence 1896

  • He arrived in a comfortable open carriage — one of the kind called landau — drawn by two tall and powerful but not well-shaped horses.

    The Torrents of Spring 2006

  • They are alone in the immense landau, which is filled with flowers like a giant basket.

    Original Short Stories — Volume 12 Guy de Maupassant 1871

  • They are alone in the immense landau, which is filled with flowers like a giant basket.

    Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant Guy de Maupassant 1871

  • He arrived in a comfortable open carriage -- one of the kind called landau -- drawn by two tall and powerful but not well-shaped horses.

    The Torrents of Spring Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev 1850

  • You remind the mechanic that the man in the landau has been the ruin of thousands, and you mention people whom he himself knows, people in various grades of life, widows and orphans amongst them, whose little all he has dissipated, and whom he has reduced to beggary by inducing them to become sharers in his delusive schemes.

    The Romany Rye A Sequel to 'Lavengro' George Henry Borrow 1842

  • You remind the mechanic that the man in the landau has been the ruin of thousands and you mention people whom he himself knows, people in various grades of life, widows and orphans amongst them, whose little all has been dissipated, and whom he has reduced to beggary by inducing them to become sharers in his delusive schemes.

    The Romany Rye George Henry Borrow 1842

  • A landau was a "social carriage" meant to haul four rich folks in bouncy, horse-poop-scented comfort back in the 18th century, but Malaise Era marketers in the Motor City made the name their own.

    Jalopnik: Top 2009

  • When Mrs. Radcliffe, at the date definitely given of 1584, talks about "the Parisian opera," represents a French girl of the sixteenth century as being "instructed in the English poets," and talks about driving in a "landau," the individual blunders are, perhaps, not more violent than those of the chronology by which Scott's Ulrica is apparently a girl at the time of the Conquest and a woman, not too old to be the object of rivalry between Front de Boeuf and his father, not long before the reign of Richard I.

    The English Novel George Saintsbury 1889

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