Freight

How to spell freight

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce freight

What does freight mean?

1. nounGoods transported in bulk by ship, train, lorry, or aircraft.
2. verbTo transport goods commercially as cargo.

Freight in a sentence

• noun

  The warehouse handles freight arriving from three different ports.

• verb

  The firm will freight the machinery overseas by container ship.

• noun

  Rail freight moves far more tonnage across the country than most people realise.

• verb

  It is cheaper to freight heavy materials by rail than by road.

Where does freight come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Freight came into English in the late 1300s from Middle Dutch and Middle Low German, where the word vrecht or vracht meant the cargo loaded onto a ship and also the money charged for carrying it. That sense of hired transport reflects the busy maritime trade between English and Low Country ports in the medieval period, when much vocabulary of shipping and commerce crossed the North Sea. The same Germanic root lies behind the modern German word Fracht, still meaning cargo or carriage charge. Over time English broadened the term from sea carriage to goods moved by road and rail, and it now covers commercial cargo of every kind. The spelling is the classic trap: the 'eigh' cluster sounds simply like a long 'a', so it shares its tricky pattern with 'weight' and 'eight' rather than following any phonetic logic.

How the word is built

• freight (from Middle Dutch vrecht: cargo, transport charge), single root, no affixes