Tote

How to spell tote

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tote

What does tote mean?

1. verbTo carry something, especially something bulky or heavy, by hand or over a distance.
2. nounA large open-topped bag with handles, used for carrying everyday items.

Tote in a sentence

• verb

  The movers had to tote the heavy boxes up four flights of stairs.

• noun

  She stuffed her laptop, lunch, and umbrella into a single canvas tote.

• verb

  She packed light so she would not have to tote a huge suitcase across the city.

• noun

  The conference handed out a free cotton tote to every attendee.

Where does tote come from?

Language of origin: Other

Tote is a curiously rootless word that first surfaced in the American colonies in the late 1600s, where it meant simply to carry or haul something by hand. Its origin has never been settled with certainty, but the most widely supported theory traces it to a West African language carried to the New World through the Atlantic slave trade, comparing it to the Kikongo word tota, which meant 'to pick up'. Because it began as a spoken, working word rather than a literary one, it left almost no early written trail, which is part of why its history is so hazy. From the plain sense of carrying came the twentieth-century 'tote bag', a roomy open-topped bag literally made for toting things around. The short, phonetically regular spelling means the word is easy to write once you know it, even though where it actually came from remains genuinely uncertain.

How the word is built

• tote (single root verb, of uncertain origin; no prefix or suffix)