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Thunderbird

nounproper nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈθʌndə(ɹ).bɜː(ɹ)d//

A locomotive stored at a strategic point on the network so as to be available to quickly rescue a failed train.

noun

  1. 1

    A locomotive stored at a strategic point on the network so as to be available to quickly rescue a failed train.

  2. 2

    Variant of thunderbirdAlternative letter-case form of thunderbird.

Etymology

The railway sense is derived from the 1960s TV series Thunderbirds, about a secretive high-tech rescue organization, ultimately from thunderbird.

proper noun

  1. 1

    Mozilla Thunderbird.

  2. 2

    Ford Thunderbird.

Forms

plural
Thunderbirds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).