Baggage

How to spell baggage

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baggage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baggage mean?

1. nounThe bags, cases, and personal belongings a traveller carries on a journey.
2. nounPast experiences, attitudes, or problems that a person carries into new situations.

Baggage in a sentence

• The airline charges extra for heavy baggage on long flights.

• He brought a lot of emotional baggage into the new relationship.

• We collected our baggage from the carousel after landing.

• The project came with political baggage that slowed every decision.

Where does baggage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word arrived in English in the late 1400s from Old French 'bagage', which meant the collected belongings or equipment of an army on the move. That French noun was built on 'bague', a bundle or pack, combined with the collective suffix '-age', so the literal sense was 'the whole lot of packed-up gear'. The same '-age' ending that turns 'bag' into 'baggage' also gives us words like 'luggage' and 'package', where it signals a bundle or a quantity of something. From the early sense of military supplies it broadened to mean any traveller's luggage, and by the twentieth century it had also taken on the figurative meaning of accumulated emotional burdens. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the double 'g' followed by '-age', which writers sometimes flatten into a single 'g' or misremember as '-idge'.

How the word is built

• bag (pack, bundle)
• -age (noun suffix denoting a collection or condition)