traffic

Etymology

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 (tafrīq, “distribution, dispersion”), reshaped to match the native prefix tra- (“trans-”). The adjective sense is possibly influenced by Tagalog trapik and follows a general trend in Philippine English to make nouns adjectives.

noun

1. Moving pedestrians or vehicles, 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.
   To assume that the recent investigation of the white slave traffic (and, by the way, a very superficial investigation) has discovered anything new, is, to say the least, very foolish 1910, Emma Goldman, “The Traffic in Women”, in Anarchism and Other Essays
   Its units of study are regions or oceans, long-distance trades …, the traffic of cults and beliefs between cultures and continents. 2007, John Darwin, After Tamerlane, Penguin, page 12
3. Illegal trade or exchange of goods, often drugs.
   They, in turn, had long dominated the drug traffic in the area of north-east Afghanistan that they controlled during the Taliban years. 2018-01-09, Alfred W. McCoy, “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
4. Exchange or flux of information, messages or data, as in a computer or telephone network.
   1. (radio) In CB radio, formal written messages relayed on behalf of others.
   2. (advertising) The amount of attention paid to a particular printed page etc. in a publication.
      Those fixed locations which are sold to advertisers become preferred according to the expected page traffic. 1950, Advertising & Selling (volume 43, part 2, page 53)
5. Commodities of the market.
   You'll see a draggled damsel / From Billingsgate her fishy traffic bear. 1716, John Gay, Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London

verb

1. (intransitive) To pass goods and commodities from one person to another for an equivalent in goods or money; to buy or sell goods.
2. (intransitive) To trade meanly or mercenarily; to bargain.
3. (transitive) To exchange in traffic; to effect by a bargain or for a consideration.
   A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisp locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase. 1912, The World's Wit and Humor, page 176

adj

1. (Philippines) congested