Trucking

How to spell trucking

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce trucking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does trucking mean?

1. nounThe business or activity of transporting goods by lorry or truck.
2. verbTransporting goods, or moving steadily along, by truck.

Trucking in a sentence

• noun

  The family ran a small trucking firm that moved furniture between cities.

• verb

  The crew spent the whole week trucking gravel from the quarry to the site.

• noun

  Rising fuel prices have squeezed profit margins across the trucking industry.

• verb

  He kept trucking down the motorway despite the heavy rain.

Where does trucking come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The base word truck has a tangled history. The vehicle sense traces back to the Latin trochus, meaning an iron hoop or wheel, which was itself borrowed from the Greek trokhos, a wheel, built on the verb trekhein, to run. English picked it up in the 1600s as a nautical term for a small wooden wheel or roller used on ships, and from there it broadened to mean a wheeled cart or barrow for moving heavy loads. By the nineteenth century, especially in American usage, truck had come to mean a large motor vehicle for carrying freight, and trucking named the whole business of hauling goods that way. Note that there is a separate, older truck meaning to barter or exchange (as in 'truck and barter'), which comes instead from the Old French troquer, to swap; that one is unrelated to the wheel. The spelling stays comfortably regular: the hard 'ck' simply records the short vowel before adding -ing.

How the word is built

• truck (wheeled vehicle for hauling goods)
• -ing (noun/verb suffix forming a gerund or present participle)