The Etymology of Coupe
Coupe (also coupé, with the accent dropped in much American usage) names a body style of car, but the word is older than the car. In 19th-century France, a carrosse coupé was a horse-drawn carriage with the front section cut away — a four-wheeled vehicle with a single rear passenger compartment, no front-facing seats, and the driver perched outside on a box. The past participle coupé means cut, from couper, to cut, ultimately from Old French colp, blow, from Latin colaphus, from Greek kolaphos meaning a blow with the fist. So a coupé carriage was, etymologically, a struck-or-cut carriage. When motor cars arrived around 1900, the term was transferred to the new closed two-door body style with a similar shortened profile, in contrast to the longer four-door sedan. Coupe joins the same etymological family as coup (a sudden strike), coup d’état, coup de grâce, and coupon (a piece cut off, a small cut-out ticket). Modern car-makers have kept the name even as the shape evolved into the long, sloping fastback now usually called a coupé.