Payload

How to spell payload

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce payload

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does payload mean?

1. nounThe cargo, passengers, or load that a vehicle carries and that generates revenue, as opposed to fuel and the vehicle itself.
2. nounThe meaningful data carried within a transmission, or the active and often harmful component of malware.

Payload in a sentence

• The freight company calculated the maximum payload each truck could legally carry.

• The security team isolated the email before its malicious payload could execute.

• The cargo plane returned half empty, well below its profitable payload.

• Each network packet has a header and a data payload.

Where does payload come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Payload is a modern English compound, stitched together from two older native words: 'pay' and 'load'. 'Pay' arrived through Old French 'paier', from Latin 'pacare', which literally meant 'to pacify' or 'to appease'; a debtor was thought to be calming a creditor by handing over money, and the sense of settling a debt is how it reached English in the 1200s. 'Load', by contrast, is thoroughly Germanic, coming from Old English 'lad', originally meaning a way, course, or carrying, and related to 'lead'. The two were joined only in the early twentieth century, when commercial aviation and shipping needed a term for the part of a cargo that actually earns money, as distinct from fuel and the vehicle itself. From that revenue-earning core the word spread to rocketry (the instruments or warhead a missile carries) and then to computing (the meaningful data inside a transmission, or the harmful component of malware). The spelling is straightforward once you see it is simply pay plus load with no letters lost at the join.

How the word is built

• pay (compensation, revenue-earning)
• load (cargo, burden carried)