Baggage Travels With You, Literally and Otherwise

Baggage is the whole set of bags and cases a traveller takes. It is a mass noun: you have a lot of baggage, never two baggages. The figurative sense arrived much later, and it is unkind: emotional baggage is the past you did not manage to leave behind.

• Bags and cases taken on a journey. *Collect your baggage at carousel four.*
• Unresolved problems from the past. *He came with a lot of emotional baggage.*
• Army equipment (historical). *The baggage train followed the column.*

Word forms

How it is used in a sentence

• All baggage must be checked in an hour before departure.Singular verb — the noun is uncountable.
• The airline lost my baggage in Frankfurt.Not baggages, even for several bags.
• Every candidate arrives with some political baggage.Figurative and slightly disapproving.

Baggage or luggage?

• Luggage — preferred in British English for the bags themselves
• Baggage — preferred in American English, and standard worldwide in airline signage
• Baggage alone carries the emotional sense; nobody speaks of emotional luggage
• Both are uncountable, so both need *a piece of* to be counted

From Old French *bagage*, from *bague*, a bundle. The military baggage train — the carts of supplies trailing an army — kept the word alive for centuries before air travel gave it a new home.