火车
huǒ chē
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 火車
A train that runs on rails, carrying passengers or goods. To travel by train is 坐火车, and the station is 火车站 (huǒchēzhàn). The name, 'fire vehicle', goes back to the days of steam engines.
Tàu hoả, xe lửa: đoàn tàu chạy trên đường ray, chở người hoặc hàng hoá. Đi tàu là 坐火车, ga tàu là 火车站 (huǒchēzhàn). Tên gọi 火车, nghĩa đen là “xe lửa” (火 lửa, 车 xe), có từ thời đầu máy hơi nước.
NounRegister: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 064 (2026-11-14). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “hoả xa” (hoa-xa). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “火车” mean?
A train that runs on rails, carrying passengers or goods. To travel by train is 坐火车, and the station is 火车站 (huǒchēzhàn). The name, 'fire vehicle', goes back to the days of steam engines. Literally: fire vehicle
Is “火车” formal or informal?
火车 is generally neutral.