traffic

English Online Dictionary. What means traffic‎? What does traffic mean?

English

Alternative forms

• traffick (archaic), traffique (obsolete)

Etymology

From Middle French trafique, traffique (“traffic”), from Italian traffico (“traffic”) from trafficare (“to carry on trade”). Potentially from Vulgar Latin *trānsfrīcāre (“to rub across”); Klein instead suggests the Italian has ultimate origin in Arabic تَفْرِيق (tafrīq, “distribution, dispersion”), reshaped to match the native prefix tra- (“trans-”).

The adjectival sense is possibly influenced by Tagalog trapik and follows a general trend in Philippine English to construct a noun from an adjective.

Pronunciation

• enPR: trăf'ĭk, IPA^(key): /ˈtɹæfɪk/
• Rhymes: -æfɪk

Noun

traffic (usually uncountable, plural traffics)

2. Moving pedestrians or vehicles, or the flux or passage thereof.
4. The commercial transportation or exchange of goods, or the movement of passengers or people.
6. The illegal trade or exchange of goods, often drugs.

   Synonym: (more common) trafficking
8. The exchange or flux of information, messages or data, as in a computer or telephone network.
   1. (radio) Of CB radio, formal written messages relayed on behalf of others.
   2. (advertising) The amount of attention paid to a particular printed page etc., in a publication.
      • 1950, Advertising & Selling (volume 43, part 2, page 53)

        Those fixed locations which are sold to advertisers become preferred according to the expected page traffic.

10. The commodities of the market.

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

traffic (third-person singular simple present traffics, present participle trafficking, simple past and past participle trafficked)

1. (intransitive) To pass goods and commodities from one person to another for an equivalent in goods or money; to buy or sell goods.

   Synonym: trade

2. (intransitive) To trade meanly or mercenarily; to bargain.
3. (transitive) To exchange in traffic; to effect by a bargain or for a consideration.

Derived terms

• sex-traffic
• sex trafficking
• trafficker
• trafficking

Translations

Adjective

traffic (comparative more traffic, superlative most traffic)

1. (Philippines) Congested.

References

• “traffic”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.