Trade, money & lettersMyths & disputes

traffic

Traffic began as trade: Italian traffico 'commerce' passed through French into English around 1500, and only in the 1800s did it come to mean people and vehicles on the move. Where the Italian verb trafficare came from is unknown.

Weakest linkCertain

The story you may have heard

Ernest Klein proposed that Italian traffico comes from Arabic tafrīq 'distribution, dispersion', reshaped to look like tra- 'across', and the extracted draft treated this as the source. No major dictionary accepts it. Etymonline and the OED call the word of uncertain origin, and the Arabic guess needs an unexplained change of tafr- to traf-.

The road to English

From Italian to Spanish

From Middle French to Turkish

From English to Tagalog

1300Italian

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.

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