traffic

• traffick

From Middle French trafique (“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 (tafrīq, “distribution, dispersion”), reshaped to match the native prefix tra- (“trans-”).

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• Rhymes: -æfɪk

traffic (usually uncountable, plural traffics)

1. Pedestrians or vehicles on roads, or the flux or passage thereof.

   The traffic is slow during rush hour.

2. Commercial transportation or exchange of goods, or the movement of passengers or people.
   • 1719, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe:

     I had three large axes, and abundance of hatchets (for we carried the hatchets for traffic with the Indians).

   • 2007, John Darwin, After Tamerlane, Penguin 2008, p. 12:

     Its units of study are regions or oceans, long-distance trades [...], the traffic of cults and beliefs between cultures and continents.

3. Illegal trade or exchange of goods, often drugs.
4. Exchange or flux of information, messages or data, as in a computer or telephone network.
5. Commodities of the market.
   • John Gay

     You'll see a draggled damsel / From Billingsgate her fishy traffic bear.

traffic (third-person singular simple present traffics, present participle trafficking, simple past and past participle trafficked)

1. (intransitive) To pass goods and commodities from one person to another for an equivalent in goods or money; to buy or sell goods

   Synonym: trade

2. (intransitive) To trade meanly or mercenarily; to bargain.
3. (transitive) To exchange in traffic; to effect by a bargain or for a consideration.

• traffic in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.