Other forms: hauled, hauling, hauls
To haul something is to pull or drag it when it is heavy enough to make you lean into the work. A fisherman hauling a net over the side, two people hauling a sofa up a staircase, a tractor hauling a trailer of hay.
The effort is the whole point, so you do not haul a cup across a table. As a noun, a haul is what was taken in one go: the thieves' haul, a record haul of fish, a haul of medals at the games. A haul is also a distance you have to cover, which gives a long haul home and a long-haul flight, while in it for the long haul means staying with something hard until it is done. Haulage is the business of moving goods by road. And to haul someone over the coals is to tell them off severely.
1verbhaulTo pull or drag something heavy with effort.~35%
“They hauled the boat up onto the shingle.”
2nounamountAn amount taken, caught or stolen at one time.~30%
“Police recovered most of the haul from a lock-up.”
3nounlongA long distance or long stretch of effort to get through.~35%
“It is a four-hour haul back to the coast.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Haul came from Middle English halen and Old French haler, to haul or pull, which French had taken from a Frankish word halon meaning to drag, fetch, haul. Behind all of them lies a Proto-Indo-European root kelh-, to call, cry or summon. Fetching a thing and calling for it were once the same idea; the heavy rope came later.
Proto-Indo-European
*kelh₁- — to call, cry, summon
Proto-Germanic
*halōną
Old English
*halian — to haul, drag
Middle Dutch
halen — to drag, fetch, haul
Frankish
*halōn — to drag, fetch, haul
Old French
haler — to haul, pull
Middle English
hālen
English, today
haul
Built from
From Middle English hālen, hailen, haulen, halien (“to drag, pull; to draw up”), from Old French haler (“to haul, pull”), from Frankish halōn (“to drag, fetch, haul”) or Middle Dutch halen (“to drag, fetch, haul”), possibly merging with Old English halian (“to haul, drag”); all from Proto-Germanic halōną, halēną, hulōną (“to call, fetch, summon”), from Proto-Indo-European kelh₁- (“to call, cry, summon”). The noun is derived from the verb. 2 The word is cognate with Danish hale (“to haul”), Middle Dutch halen (“to draw, fetch, haul”), Dutch halen (“to fetch, bring, haul”), Old Frisian halia, stq halen (“to draw, haul, pull”), Low German halen (“to draw, pull”), Old High German halôn, holôn, German holen (“to fetch, get”), Norwegian hale (“to haul”), Old Saxon halôn (“to fetch, get”), Swedish hala (“to hale, haul, pull, tug”), and related to Old English ġeholian (“to get, obtain”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA