The word coach, as in basketball coach, began as a Hungarian cart! Here’s the story. The coach was named after a small Hungarian village, Kocs, where superior wagons, carts and carriages were built. Kocs, in the Hungarian district of Komarom-Esztergom, lay on the main road along the Danube between Vienna and Budapest. These two great cities needed well-built, fast vehicles that would carry more than two people over the bumpy roads of the day in as much comfort as was then possible.
One of the best of these multi-horse carts was called in Hungarian kocsi szekér ‘a wagon from Kocs.’ In Kocs, one of the first successful, reasonably comfortable passenger coaches, a light, graceful, four-wheeled wagon with a strap suspension, was built. Its design was so compact, elegant and sturdy that this coach design spread throughout Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. The German-speaking Viennese started to call this vehicle a Kutsche, which is how they heard Hungarians saying the name of the little carriage-making town. From Vienna these lively vehicles traveled to Paris and the French, adapting the Austrian word, called it a coche. In Rome it was, and still is, in Italian cocchio. Eventually the English borrowed the word and the vehicle and called it a coach. How early did the little Hungarian town of Kocs gain renown as a place of excellent carriage-makers? There is strong evidence (printed) that when Anne of Bohemia married England’s Richard II in 1382 CE, she brought carriages from Kocs, Hungary with her to England.
English words we borrowed from the Hungarian language include goulash (a stew made with beef or veal), paprika (a seasoning made from sweet red peppers), coach, and saber (a cavalry sword). How then did a Hungarian horse-carriage word get applied to a basketball coach? Two theories have been offered, one suggesting metaphorical word use, the other bluntly descriptive of an action. A coach was first a tutor who guided students through various fields of study or lessons. The coach carried the student through the course, as a coach and four might carry an 18th century English family to London. That is the commonly accepted theory. I prefer the other British idea that wealthy squires had their servants read to them as they drove in coaches about the countryside on their business or on long trips into a nearby city. A private tutor might come along to assist their children or indeed read aloud to the children, who would thus be “coached” in their studies as they proceeded along the country roads. It was only a short jump in meaning from an academic “coach” to one who coached in sports like basketball or football, who showed players, by virtue of his broader expertise and experience, some of the plays and tricks needed to excel in a particular sport.
How much we lost when the eco-friendly coach and the team of horses were lost to civilization, to be replaced by smelly, poisonous vehicles from Detroit propelled by one of the least efficient fuel-operated machines ever devised, namely, the internal combustion engine.
How much more calming to set off on a quiet summer afternoon at a modest trot in a slim caleche like the yellow beauty shown above.
About Hungarian Hungarian is an Ugric language of the Finno-Ugric subgroup of the Uralic language family. Originally from a large region in Central European Russia, Finno-Ugric peoples started migrating in different directions around 3000 BC. In the first centuries of the Christian era, the Ugrians began a slow migration westward towards present-day Hungary. They arrived in the ninth century, making contact with the Bulgar Turks and the Khazars. In this way, the largest Finno-Ugric nation came into existence. Constituting a unique enclave surrounded by speakers of Germanic, Slavic, Romanian and Turkic languages, Hungary was linguistically very isolated. The closest related languages are the Ostyak and Vogul languages of Siberia, spoken in a region more than 2,000 miles away.
Historical mail coach on a Russian stamp commemorating a Russian mail route that ran from Moscow to the port of Riga, capital of Latvia, on the Baltic Sea. Coaches speeded up postal services which had been terribly slow and jolty before 1784. In that year the English mail coach rumbled along the first pebbly route. Not only was it the fastest, but also it offered the most punctual service in the world. It needed masses of good horses. They were known as Yorkshire Coach horses and were unrivalled right up until the mid-19th century when the Hungarian Jukker, an unbelievably nimble-footed breed, took the lead. Jukkers drew the carriages of monarchs all over Europe including the German Emperor William II and Tsar Alexander III. Even King Edward VII journeyed to Budapest to buy a carriage with Jukkers. One of the most spectacular Hollywood films ever shot featured four Hungarian horses. Ben Hur's chariot was drawn by Hungarian horses sired by the Esterházy family's Tata stud.
For me, a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the most magic use of the term was in the compound word stagecoach, evoking bandanna-masked banditos riding cayuses as they charged up out of Dead Deputy Gulch and chased the stagecoach down a dusty trail. The noble cowboy hero, often John Wayne, would save the gold stored in trunks on the stagecoach by blasting the villains to smithereens with rifle and revolver. Who cared if you were likely to fracture your coccygeal vertebra as you jolted over rocky desert pistes? You were clearing the pristine, god-lovin' territory of no-good "varmints"!
© 2005 William Gordon Casselman
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coach origin of the sports term coach origin of word in Hungarian language Hungarian word in English and other world languages etymology of coach
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