What did "tractor" mean?
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Tractor
: Chir.
Copper device, which is used to bring the child, in some difficult deliveries.
Such a definition, dated 1876, may be surprising.
Especially since it is isolated and does not yet mention the agricultural tractor to which the word is attached today, spontaneously and primarily.
We owe this definition of the tractor, which is nothing other than a forceps, to Pierre Larousse, by reporting in the fifteenth and last volume of his Great Universal Dictionary of the nineteenth century, published in 1876.
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What is the origin of the word tractor?
Curiously, it is on this same date that the tractor is certified as a mechanical device suitable for towing a trailer or wagons.
It was too late, however, for Pierre Larousse to mention it, the dictionary was already printed.
On the other hand, in the Supplement to his Dictionary of the French language, published in 1878, Littré retains the word with its new definition, thus presented: "Mechanism which produces a traction", sober
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