Other forms: carriers
A carrier is a company that transports goods or people. A freight carrier, the carrier lost the parcel, a low-cost carrier.
In aviation a carrier is an airline, and low-cost carrier and flag carrier are standard terms. In shipping and post it is whoever physically moves the goods. In medicine, a carrier is somebody who carries a disease or a gene without showing symptoms, which matters enormously in genetics and in outbreaks. Note aircraft carrier, carrier bag, and carrier pigeon.
1nouncarrierA company that transports goods or people.
“The airline is the country's national carrier and flies to every continent.”
2nouncarryingSomebody carrying a disease or gene without symptoms.
“She is a carrier and has never had a symptom.”
carrier is something that carries.
Old North French carier comes from the same root as car and cart, from Latin carrus, a wagon. Everything in the family is about wheeled transport, and the medical sense is a nineteenth-century metaphor from it.
Anglo-Norman
carier,cariour
Middle English
cariere
English, today
carrier
From Middle English cariere, partly from carien + -ere, after Anglo-Norman carier,cariour, and partly directly from -. by surface analysis, carry + -er.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA