traffic

Meanings

Noun

• Moving pedestrians or vehicles, or the flux or passage thereof.
• Commercial transportation or exchange of goods, or the movement of passengers or people.
• Illegal trade or exchange of goods, often drugs.
• Exchange or flux of information, messages or data, as in a computer or telephone network.
• Commodities of the market.

Verb

• To pass goods and commodities from one person to another for an equivalent in goods or money; to buy or sell goods
• To trade meanly or mercenarily; to bargain.
• To exchange in traffic; to effect by a bargain or for a consideration.

Origin

• From Middle French trafique, traffique, from Italian traffico ("traffic") from trafficare. 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-.