Tanker

How to spell tanker

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tanker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tanker mean?

1. nounA ship, road vehicle, or aircraft built to carry large quantities of liquid or gas in bulk.

Tanker in a sentence

• The oil tanker docked at the harbour to unload its cargo.

• A fuel tanker delivered diesel to the petrol station early in the morning.

Where does tanker come from?

Language of origin: Other

The word tanker is built on tank, which entered English in the early 1600s from the Indian subcontinent, probably from a Gujarati or Marathi word for a reservoir or artificial pool; some scholars also link it to the Portuguese tanque, meaning a pond or cistern. In English a tank came to mean any large container for holding liquid, and by the late nineteenth century it described the storage compartments built into ships. The agent suffix -er, the same ending that turns a person or thing into a doer, was then added to name a vessel fitted with such tanks. Tanker is first recorded around 1900, originally for ships that carried oil in bulk, and the sense soon widened to road vehicles and aircraft built to haul liquids. Because both the k and the -er suffix are spelled exactly as they sound, the word holds few traps for a fluent writer.

How the word is built

• tank (large container for liquid)
• -er (noun suffix meaning a vehicle or vessel designed for a purpose)