Model T

English

Proper noun

Model T

1. The first car made by the Ford Motor Company on an assembly line. Before the Model T, cars were made painstakingly by hand.
   • 1920, Forrest Edwin Long, Philip Westcot Lawrence Cox, The Clearing House, page 558:

     This institution is no Model T.

   • 1923, Henry Robinson Luce, Briton Hadden, editors, Time:

     In the first of a series of almost ceremonial deaths, one Indian rams his model T into an imitation totem pole.

   • 1924, Southern Methodist University, Southwest Review, page 356:

     Jerked my thumb at a Model T, So-and-so wouldn't stop for me.

   • 1928, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, The New England Quarterly, Northeastern University, page 543:

     I can find no internal evidence that the journey was not made in the back seat of a Model T with the curtains drawn—except that the style is painfully pedestrian.

   • 1929, William Theodore Evjue, The Progressive:

     ... whenever they learned that a lynching was brewing they went by buggy, train, or Model T straight to the sheriff of the county and stayed with him until he did something about it.

   • 1931, Whit Burnett, Martha Foley, Story Magazine:

     "Is a guy sore if the Model T he got for twenty bucks don't run after he's run it five year? Forget it Johnny, profit and loss."

   • 1934, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, Westering, page 89:

     You can get about as much from a Model-T/Stripped and forgotten in a sage arroyo/As you can from asking the blue peaks over and over: "Will something old come back again tonight?"

   • 1955, Lila Bell Acheson Wallace, De Witt Wallace, editors, The Reader's Digest, page 40:

     All of a sudden, as Martin covered the countryside in his Model T, he began to notice strange sights...

   • 1965, David Mark Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1965, page 225:

     Carts was on his way to the governor's mansion, touring the rural back country in his Model T, sounding the warning against the encroachments of Satan.

   • 1999, James Stuart Olson, Historical Dictionary of the 1960s, page 59:

     When Senator Oscar Underwood announced his intention to retire in 1926, Black decided to run for Senate. He simply took off on his own, covering the back country alone in his Model-T, speaking anywhere he could find listeners and staying with anyone who would put up with him.

   • 2005, Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food, page 40:

     Charles Odell Lovette, the patriarch of the family that was to build North Carolina-based Holly Farms into one of the largest poultry companies in the world, began in the mid-1920s by gathering country produce in his Model T and hauling it to city markets.

Synonyms

• Tin Lizzie

Translations

first car made by Ford Motor Co. on an assembly line

• Dutch: T-Ford
• Hungarian: T Modell
• Marathi: मॉडेल टी f (mŏḍel ṭī)

Anagrams

• molted