Traffic

How to spell traffic

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce traffic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does traffic mean?

1. nounThe vehicles and people moving along roads or routes, especially when considered in volume.
2. verbTo buy and sell something, especially goods that are illegal or stolen.

Traffic in a sentence

• noun

  Heavy traffic on the motorway delayed her by an hour.

• verb

  The gang was caught trying to traffic in stolen artwork.

• noun

  The new bypass was built to ease the town's traffic.

• verb

  Customs officers watch the ports for anyone who might traffic in contraband.

Where does traffic come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Traffic entered English in the early 1500s from the Italian word traffico, meaning 'commerce' or 'trade', the noun belonging to the verb trafficare, 'to trade'. The deeper origin is uncertain and much debated; some trace it to a Latin source combining trans, 'across', with a verb for carrying or handling goods, which fits the idea of merchandise being moved from place to place. French had its own form, trafique, and the word seems to have reached English through both Italian and French commercial vocabulary of the merchant age. For centuries traffic meant the buying and selling of goods, and that older trading sense survives in phrases like 'drug traffic'. The familiar modern meaning, the movement of vehicles and people along a road, only grew up in the nineteenth century as towns and railways filled with congestion. A useful spelling note: although the base word ends in a plain c, that c hardens to ck before a vowel suffix, giving trafficking and trafficked.

How the word is built

• traffic (single root from Italian traffico, 'trade'); note the hard -c that gains a k before suffixes: trafficking, trafficked