traffic

UK/ˈtɹæfɪk/US/ˈtɹæfɪk/

nounA13 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,146 of 15,258leans written

Traffic is all the vehicles moving, or failing to move, on a road. Brake lights as far as you can see.

The word is a mass noun, so there is a lot of traffic rather than many traffics. It comes with its own furniture: traffic lights, a traffic jam, a traffic warden, the traffic news on the radio. It also covers movement of other kinds — air traffic, and the traffic to a website. There is a much darker sense as well, since trafficking means trading illegally in drugs, weapons or people.

Definitions of traffic

1nountrafficVehicles moving along a road, taken together.A1~55%
“We sat in traffic for an hour.”
2nounmovementThe movement of aircraft, data or people through a system.B2~43%
“The site handles heavy traffic in the evenings.”
3verbtradeTo trade in something illegally.C1~2%
“They were convicted of trafficking in stolen goods.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

Traffic was trade before it was congestion. Italian trafficare meant to carry on trade, and one suggestion takes it back to a Latin phrase meaning to rub across. Vehicles are a very late arrival.

tl
trapik
Arabic
تَفْرِيق — distribution, dispersion
Vulgar Latin
*trānsfrīcāre — to rub across
Italian
traffico — traffic
Middle French
trafique
English, today
traffic

Built from

traffique · Middle French — traffic
trafficare · Italian — to carry on trade
tra- · Italian — trans-

From Middle French trafique, traffique (“traffic”), from Italian traffico (“traffic”) from trafficare (“to carry on trade”). Potentially from Vulgar Latin trānsfrīcāre (“to rub across”); Klein instead suggests the Italian has ultimate origin in Arabic تَفْرِيق (“distribution, dispersion”), reshaped to match the native prefix tra- (“trans-”). The adjectival sense is possibly influenced by tl trapik and follows a general trend in Philippine English to construct a noun from an adjective.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Travel & Transport, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

traffic in the wild

To prevent collisions, ATC enforces traffic separation rules, which ensure each aircraft maintains a minimum amount of empty space around it.
Air traffic control
The usual traffic light colors are red to stop traffic, amber to signal a change, and green to allow traffic to proceed.
Traffic light
Traffic lights were first introduced in December 1868 on Parliament Square in London to reduce the need for police officers to control traffic.
Traffic light
Boat traffic on bodies of water is RHT, regardless of location.
Left- and right-hand traffic
Other aspects of U.S. traffic safety, including road design, traffic enforcement, and crash investigation are outside of the NHTSA's jurisdiction.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the trapik family

traffic

traffic — used about once every 116 pages · #1,146 · point at the bar for the others

Definitions of traffic

1nountrafficVehicles moving along a road, taken together.A1~55%

“We sat in traffic for an hour.”

2nounmovementThe movement of aircraft, data or people through a system.B2~43%

“The site handles heavy traffic in the evenings.”

3verbtradeTo trade in something illegally.C1~2%

“They were convicted of trafficking in stolen goods.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.