groupage

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — group sits at #536Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Groupage is combining small consignments into one load. Ship by groupage.

Nobody could afford a container each, so several firms share one and split the cost. Groupage is slower, since the load waits until there is enough of it to send.

Definitions of groupage

1noungroupageCombining small consignments into one load.C2
“Groupage brought the freight cost down by two thirds.”

groupage is a method.

Where it comes from

From group plus the French ending -age; the word came into English shipping from French freight forwarding.

French
groupe
English
group
English, today
groupage

Built from

groppo · Italian — a knot, heap, group, bag (of money)

From group + age. group Borrowed from French groupe. From French groupe (“cluster, group”), from Italian gruppo, groppo (“a knot, heap, group, bag (of money)”). Displaced native Old English hād (“tribe, group”). In the "group theory" sense, calque#Verb from French groupe, a term coined by the young French mathematician Évariste Galois in 1830.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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