Portable means light and small enough to carry about. A portable speaker in a rucksack, a portable heater you wheel from room to room, the portable television that used to live on the kitchen counter.
The bar is 'one person can carry it', so a portable generator is still heavy enough to make you grunt. The word travels beyond objects: a portable pension follows you from job to job, and your phone number is portable between networks, meaning you keep it when you switch. In computing, portable code runs on more than one kind of machine without being rewritten. The noun is portability, and the everyday verb behind the idea is carry. Portable describes the thing carried, never the person carrying it.
1adjectiveportableLight and small enough to be carried around.
“She kept a portable radio on the workbench.”
synonyms: handheld, movable
2adjectivetransferredAble to be transferred from one job, provider or system to another.
“The pension is portable if you move to another university.”
3adjectivesoftwareOf software: able to run on different systems without being rewritten.
“They wrote the tool in portable C so it would build anywhere.”
Portable came into Middle English through Middle French from Latin portābilis. Behind that lies a Proto-Indo-European root about faring and going across, which is exactly what carrying is: taking a thing with you as you go. The same Latin family gave English transport and porter.
Proto-Indo-European
*per- (fare)
Latin
portābilis
Middle French
portable
Middle English
portable
English, today
portable
From Middle English portable, from Middle French portable and Latin portābilis. by surface analysis, port + -able.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building
First appears in chapter 38 of A Man Called Ove.
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