Other forms: trading, traded, trades
To trade is to buy, sell or swap. Trade with other countries, trade shares, they traded stickers all break.
The noun covers the activity — international trade, the wool trade — and a skilled manual job: learn a trade, a plumber by trade. Those two are different enough that context always sorts them. Note trade in, meaning to give an old thing as part payment for a new one, and trade off, meaning to accept less of one thing for more of another, which gives the very useful noun trade-off. And the trade, with the, means the people working in a particular industry.
1verbtradeTo buy, sell or exchange goods.
“The two countries trade oil for food.”
2nounbuyingThe buying and selling of goods.
“Trade between the two has almost stopped.”
3nounskilledA skilled manual job.
“He is an electrician by trade.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
trade is a way of exchanging, or a skilled job.
Also accepted in games: exchange
Middle Low German trade meant a track or a course, from the same root as tread. A trade was originally the path somebody walked — a course of life — and the sense of buying and selling came from the regular route a merchant took.
Old Saxon
trada
Middle Low German
trade
Middle English
trade
English, today
trade
From Middle English trade, from Middle Low German trade, from Old Saxon trada. From Middle English trade (“path, course of conduct”), introduced into English by Hanseatic merchants, from Middle Low German trade (“track, course”), from Old Saxon trada (“spoor, track”), from Proto-West Germanic tradu, from Proto-Germanic tradō (“track, way”), and cognate with Old English tredan (“to tread”); ultimately from Proto-Indo-European dreh₂- (“to tread, walk, step, run”). Cognate with Dutch trade, tra (“path, trail, course, trade”), German Low German Traad (“track, wagon trail”), lb Tratt (“step, pace”), Icelandic tröð (“a lane between fences, enclosure, pen”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA