Porter

How to spell porter

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce porter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does porter mean?

1. nounA person employed to carry luggage or goods, especially at a station, hotel, or airport.
2. nounA person who guards or attends the entrance of a building, especially in British colleges and hospitals.
3. nounA dark style of beer brewed from roasted malt, similar to but lighter than stout.

Porter in a sentence

• The hotel porter wheeled our heavy cases up to the room.

• The college porter kept the keys and signed visitors in at the lodge.

• He ordered a pint of porter to go with the rich beef stew.

• A porter helped the climbers haul their equipment up the mountain trail.

• A hospital porter directed the family to the correct ward.

• The brewery is known for a smooth chocolate porter on tap.

Where does porter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Porter actually packs two Latin roots into one spelling. The sense of a luggage carrier descends from the Latin verb portare, meaning 'to carry', which gave Old French portier and reached English in the 1300s for someone employed to carry burdens. The separate sense of a doorkeeper comes instead from the Latin porta, meaning 'gate' or 'door', through the Old French portier for the person who guards an entrance; this is the same root that sits inside 'portal' and 'port' as in a harbour gate. The dark, heavy beer earned its name in early 1700s London because it was the favourite drink of the city's street and river porters who hauled goods for a living. Because both the carrying word and the gatekeeping word collapsed into the identical English form, the single spelling 'porter' quietly carries two distinct ancestries. The plain -er ending is simply the ordinary agent suffix marking the person who does the job.

How the word is built

• port (Latin portare 'to carry', or porta 'gate')
• -er (agent suffix: one who)