Truck

How to spell truck

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce truck

What does truck mean?

1. nounA large motor vehicle designed to carry goods or heavy loads by road.
2. verbTo transport goods using a large road vehicle.

Truck in a sentence

• noun

  The delivery truck pulled up outside the warehouse at dawn.

• verb

  The company will truck the produce to markets across the region.

• noun

  A heavy truck blocked the narrow lane for almost an hour.

• verb

  Workers had to truck tonnes of gravel up to the building site.

Where does truck come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The vehicle sense of truck traces back through Latin trochus, meaning an iron hoop or small wheel, which itself was borrowed from Greek trokhos, a wheel, ultimately from the verb trekhein, meaning to run. English first used truck in the early 1600s for a small solid wheel or roller, especially the wooden ones fitted under heavy naval gun carriages so they could be moved about a ship's deck. From that idea of a wheeled platform for shifting heavy loads, the meaning broadened to handcarts, then to railway wagons in British usage, and finally to the powered goods vehicle that dominates the word today. There is a separate, unrelated truck meaning dealings or barter, as in the phrase to have no truck with something, which comes instead from the Old French troquer, to exchange. Because the modern spelling is short and phonetic, the only thing to remember is the simple ck ending that the running, rolling Greek root quietly left behind.

How the word is built

• truck (single root; from Latin trochus, a wheel or hoop)