A safety device in cars that automatically inflates with air when there's a crash to protect passengers from injury.
From 'air' (gas) plus 'bag' (container). The compound word emerged in the 1980s when airbags became standard safety equipment in automobiles.
Airbags are a triumph of applied physics—they had to solve the problem that stopping a crash too fast kills you, so engineers made them inflate for just fractions of a second to slow you down gradually enough to survive.
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