Other forms: porters
A porter is the person who carries your bags. At the hotel door, on a station platform, wheeling a trolley of suitcases towards the lift while you hunt for your ticket.
In Britain the word stretches further than luggage. A hospital porter pushes beds and trolleys between wards all day; a college or a block of flats has a porter at the entrance, sitting in the porter's lodge and taking in parcels. On a mountain trek the porters carry the loads up to the camps, and the work has a name of its own, portering. Porter is also a dark brown beer, close to stout, which is why a pub board can offer you a porter with no bags in sight. In American English the porter on a long-distance train is the attendant who makes up the beds.
1nounporterSomeone whose job is carrying luggage for travellers or hotel guests.
“The porter took our cases up to the room.”
2nounworkerA worker who moves equipment around a hospital or looks after the entrance of a building.
“A porter wheeled the patient down to X-ray.”
3noundarkA dark, almost black beer.
“He ordered a pint of porter and sat by the fire.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
porter is a job.
Porter comes straight out of carrying. Latin portator, a carrier, from porto, to carry, travelled through Old French porteor and Anglo-Norman portour into Middle English. The bag on the shoulder is right there in the root.
Proto-Indo-European
*per- (fare)
Latin
portātor
Old French
porteor
Anglo-Norman
portour
Middle English
porter
English, today
porter
From Middle English porter, portere, portier, borrowed from Anglo-Norman portour and Old French porteor, from Latin portātor, from past participle of Latin portō (“to carry”). by surface analysis, port + -er.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA