A Cabriolet was originally a woman’s hat worn to provide protection (used 1757 in France), but quickly became the name of a horse-drawn carriage that provided some protection from the elements – a hood, or cabriolet, that could cover those sitting inside perhaps with a curtain to prevent the rain coming in. The first appearance of cabriolet in English is found in the following description: “When the bourgeois of Boulogne takes the air, he goes in a one chaise which is here called cabriolet.” This was the comment of Smollett who made a trip across Europe lasting two years. He published his experiences in Travels though France and Italy which came out in 1766, the year after he finished the journey.
As the world moved into the era of the motorcar, horse-drawn carriages disappeared, but the word cabriolet remained, despite often being substituted with the word convertible. In 1884 The Times newspaper made a reference to a “waggonette convertible to Stanhope phaeton” (both being a type of carriage), a comment which perhaps marks the start of the change from use of the term cabriolet to convertible. In 1918 the Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language describes convertible as “changeable from a closed to an open style;—said of an automobile body”.
Today both cabriolet and convertible are used in English to describe a type of car and the word cab, in taxi-cab, also derives from the word cabriolet.
