Trade

How to spell trade

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trade

What does trade mean?

1. nounThe buying and selling of goods and services, especially between countries or businesses.
2. verbTo buy and sell, or to exchange one thing for another.
3. nounA skilled occupation, especially one requiring manual training such as plumbing or carpentry.

Trade in a sentence

• noun

  The new tariffs disrupted trade between the two countries.

• verb

  The brokers trade shares from early morning until the closing bell.

• noun

  He learned his trade as an electrician through a four-year apprenticeship.

• noun

  The company built its wealth on the spice trade.

• verb

  The children agreed to trade stickers at lunchtime.

• noun

  Plumbing is a respected trade that pays well.

Where does trade come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Middle Low German trade, which literally meant a track, a path, or the course of a ship, and is closely related to the verb 'tread', meaning to step or walk. It entered English in the late 1300s through the busy trading contacts between English merchants and the Hanseatic ports of northern Germany and the Low Countries. The early English sense kept the idea of a regular path or course, and from there it broadened to mean a habitual way of life or occupation, since a person's trade was the path they walked daily. By the 1500s it had narrowed and sharpened into the modern commercial meaning, the buying and selling of goods. The shared ancestry with 'tread' is a neat memory hook: a trade was once simply the route you trod.

How the word is built

• trade (single root, from Middle Low German trade: a track or course); no prefix or suffix