Import

How to spell import

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce import

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does import mean?

1. verbTo bring goods or data into a country or system from an outside source.
2. nounA product or commodity brought into a country from abroad.
3. nounThe significance, importance, or weight of something.

Import in a sentence

• verb

  The company plans to import coffee directly from growers in Colombia.

• noun

  Cheese from France is a popular import in many supermarkets.

• noun

  The lawyer stressed the import of the missing clause in the contract.

• verb

  You can import the spreadsheet into the accounting software in one click.

• noun

  The government raised the tax on every luxury car import.

• noun

  A decision of such import should not be rushed.

Where does import come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb importare, which combined in- meaning 'into' with portare meaning 'to carry', so the literal sense was 'to carry in'. English borrowed it in the late 1400s, partly through Old French, and the trade meaning of bringing foreign goods into a country grew naturally from that idea of carrying something inward. The same portare root sits inside a whole family of familiar words, including export (to carry out), transport (to carry across), and portable (able to be carried), which makes the spelt sequence p-o-r-t easy to anchor in memory. Curiously, import also developed an abstract sense of 'significance' or 'meaning', because something that carries weight, that 'carries into' the mind, came to be described as a matter of great import. That older sense survives today mostly in formal phrases like 'of little import'. Because the spelling simply joins the prefix im- to the solid stem port, the word holds few traps for a fluent writer.

How the word is built

• im- (variant of in-: in, into)
• port (from Latin portare: to carry)