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''porter'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250716203921-00-⌔

porter - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

porter (plural porters)

  • A person who carries luggage and related objects.
    • ✤ By the time I reached the train station I was exhausted, but fortunately there was a porter waiting.
    • ✤ Achilles! a drayman, a porter, a very camel.1
    • ✤ the unsmotherable delight of all the porters and by - standers2
    • ✤ The man who carries your luggage at the station is a “red cap”, not a porter. The Canadian porter is the man who makes up the beds in the sleeping cars.3
    • ✤ As soon as we had come to a stand in Kamina Station, a swarm of porters pushed their way into the compartment to get my luggage. I selected one, and ordered the others out, and then detrained.4
    • ✤ Tips were an important part of porters’ income, and at Christmas passengers felt there was extra pressure to give them - despite some perceiving the level of service to be poor.5
  • (entomology) An ant having the specialized role of carrying.
  • (computing) One who ports software (makes it usable on another platform).
    • ✤ […] useful only if you are a Perl porter or implementor and you want to check the efficiency of the hashing algorithm.6

Noun

porter (countable and uncountable, plural porters)

  • (countable) A person in control of the entrance to a building.
  • (countable, bowling) An employee who clears and cleans tables and puts bowling balls away.
  • (countable, uncountable, beer) A strong, dark ale, originally favored by porters (etymology 1, sense 1), similar to a stout but less strong.
    • ✤ Coordinate term: stout
  • (beer, Ireland) Stout (malt brew).
    • ✤ ‘Here, Pat, give us a g.p., like a good fellow.’ The curate brought him a glass of plain porter. The man drank it at a gulp and asked for a caraway seed.7

Verb

porter (third-person singular simple present porters, present participle portering, simple past and past participle portered)

  • To serve as a porter; to carry.

Pronunciation

  • (General American) IPA: /ˈpɔɹtɚ/
  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈpɔːtə/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (rhotic, without the horse–hoarse merger) IPA: /ˈpo(ː)ɹtɚ/
  • (non-rhotic, without the horse–hoarse merger) IPA: /ˈpoətə/
  • Rhymes: -ɔː(ɹ)tə(ɹ)

Etymology 1

From Middle English porter, portere, portier, borrowed from Anglo-Norman portour and Old French porteor, from Late Latin portātor, from past participle of Latin portāre (“to carry”). By surface analysis, port (“to carry”) +‎ -er.

Etymology 2

From Middle English porter, portere, portare, borrowed from Anglo-Norman portour and Old French portier, from Late Latin portarius (“gatekeeper”), from Latin porta (“gate”).

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. c. 1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene ii]: ↩

  2. 1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, “”, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1837, →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1954 February, Trevor Holloway, “Canada’s Transcontinental Routes”, in Railway Magazine, page 130: ↩

  4. 1958 February, Arthur F. Beckenham, “A Journey in the Belgian Congo”, in Railway Magazine, page 125: ↩

  5. 2022 December 14, David Turner, “The Edwardian Christmas getaway…”, in RAIL, number 972, page 35: ↩

  6. 1998, Michael McMillan, Perl from the Ground Up, page 45: ↩

  7. 1904–1907 (date written), James Joyce, “Counterparts”, in Dubliners, London: Grant Richards, published June 1914, →OCLC, page 107: ↩

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