Over-the-road trucks

Over-the-road trucks is one of those strange phrases that creep into the language. What do the other trucks do, go UNDER the road? American Trucking Assoc says over-the-road is just another term for longhaul trucks as opposed to trucks that do pick-up-&-delivery around town. “The road” they say is out there on the great plains somewhere and “going over” it is traversing big slabs of the country as opposed to puttering around inside the cities.

The word truck itself means different things different places in the English speaking world. In the US ‘truck’ is used for everything from a tractor-trailed on down through pick-ups down to a 2-wheel hand ‘truck’ which the delivery guy uses over the sidewalk to move a heap of boxes into a building. In the US railroads a ‘truck’ is also the wheel assembly or in the UK the bogie. In Australia a truck is simply a heavy freight vehicle. The British of course don’t have trucks at all, just lorries.