Let’s start from the very birth of the name: automobile. The word derives from the French term “automobile” in turn composed of two words, one Greek and one Latin: the first part is inspired by the Greek autòs “himself, of himself, of himself”, while the second by the Latin adjective, ” mobile, that moves “. The result is a compound word which means “that moves by itself”.
Since the early years of its existence, the car has taken various names, depending on the bodywork and the set-up that distinguished it; the motorization almost never entered into these differences. Differences which, being the first cars assembled almost by hand, could be multiplied as desired according to the imagination of the coachbuilder. Today many of the original denominations have remained, always to identify a certain type of setting. Moreover, new definitions have been added to the original definitions, this time linked to the engines, or to the progress of the original project. Without pretending to compile an encyclopedia of all the names that identify each car body, we limit ourselves here to giving those most common definitions, used for more than one car, so much so that it becomes a family. We have left out those definitions, suffixes of the name of a specific model, that a company has used only once to give a better marketing position to its latest product.