Traffic Meant Trade Before It Meant Cars
Traffic is vehicles moving on a road. The word originally meant trade, which is why it also appears in the grimmest of modern compounds.
Traffic now means vehicles in motion. Its first meaning was trade: to traffic in something was to deal in it, and that older sense survives in *drug trafficking* and *human trafficking*. The road sense arrived only in the nineteenth century, as the volume of movement became a subject in itself.
- Vehicles on a road. *Heavy traffic.*
- Movement of data. *Network traffic.*
- Illegal trade. *Trafficking in weapons.*
- Website visits. *Site traffic.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | traffic | Rush-hour traffic. |
| Verb | traffic | Traffic in stolen goods. |
| Past | trafficked | Trafficked across borders. |
| Person | trafficker | A convicted trafficker. |
| Noun | trafficking | Human trafficking. |
How it is used in a sentence
- The traffic was solid for an hour.Uncountable.
- Traffic to the site doubled.Web analytics.
- Human trafficking is a serious criminal offence.The exploitation sense.
Traffic vocabulary
- Congestion — traffic exceeding road capacity
- Tailback — a queue of stationary vehicles, British
- Rat run — a residential street used as a shortcut
- Induced demand — new road capacity generating new journeys
- Traffic calming — physical measures to slow vehicles
From Italian *traffico*, trade, of uncertain earlier origin. Note the c to ck change before endings: trafficked, trafficking, as in panicked and picnicking.
Trafficked or trafficed?
Trafficked, with a k. English adds k before -ed and -ing after a final c to keep the hard sound.
What is induced demand?
The observation that adding road capacity often generates additional journeys, so congestion returns to a similar level.