Transporter

How to spell transporter

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce transporter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does transporter mean?

1. nounA vehicle or piece of equipment used to carry goods, vehicles, or people from one place to another.
2. nounIn science fiction, a device that moves a person or object instantly from one location to another.

Transporter in a sentence

• The dealership loaded the new cars onto a flatbed transporter.

• In the show, the crew stepped onto the transporter and vanished from the deck.

• The airport uses a small transporter to move luggage between terminals.

• The film's transporter could beam a character across the galaxy in seconds.

Where does transporter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is built from the Latin transportare, meaning 'to carry across', a compound of trans 'across' and portare 'to carry'. English took the verb 'transport' from Old French transporter during the 1300s, and the agent noun 'transporter' was later formed within English by adding the familiar -er suffix to mean a person or, more often, a machine that carries things across distance. The portare root is remarkably productive in English, lurking inside 'porter', 'portable', 'export', 'import' and even 'passport', so the central 'port' chunk is a reliable spelling anchor. Over the twentieth century the noun attached itself strongly to heavy vehicles, such as the lorries that haul cars, and in science fiction it gained the sense of a device that moves matter instantly from place to place. The spelling holds no surprises once you see the three clean parts: trans, port and er.

How the word is built

• trans- (across)
• port (from Latin portare: to carry)
• -er (agent suffix: thing or person that does)