1
: a freight or passenger train crew member who inspects the train and assists the conductor
2
: the member of a bobsled team who operates the brake
Examples of brakeman in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
Meyers Taylor is a four-time Olympian and three-time medalist, winning silvers as a driver in 2014 and 2018 and a bronze as a brakeman in 2010.
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USA TODAY, 4 Feb. 2022
The crew of the 40-car train included an engineer, a conductor, a brakeman and a conductor trainee.
—Josh Funk, ajc, 18 Apr. 2023
His father was a railroad brakeman who died when Billy was about 10; his mother was a substitute teacher.
—Richard Sandomir, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2023
In his memoir All the Strange Hours (1975), the anthropologist Loren Eiseley recounts an incident of the early 1930s in which a man in a hobo camp hears the twenty-year-old Eiseley tell of how he’d just been beaten by a brakeman trying to throw him off a box car.
—Vivian Gornick, The New York Review of Books, 9 Mar. 2021
See all Example Sentences for brakeman 
USA TODAY, 4 Feb. 2022
The crew of the 40-car train included an engineer, a conductor, a brakeman and a conductor trainee.
—Josh Funk, ajc, 18 Apr. 2023
His father was a railroad brakeman who died when Billy was about 10; his mother was a substitute teacher.
—Richard Sandomir, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2023
In his memoir All the Strange Hours (1975), the anthropologist Loren Eiseley recounts an incident of the early 1930s in which a man in a hobo camp hears the twenty-year-old Eiseley tell of how he’d just been beaten by a brakeman trying to throw him off a box car.
—Vivian Gornick, The New York Review of Books, 9 Mar. 2021
See all Example Sentences for brakeman
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'brakeman.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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“Brakeman.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brakeman. Accessed 27 Jul. 2024.
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brakeman
noun
brake·man
ˈbrāk-mən 
: a member of a train crew who inspects the train and assists the conductor
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