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cargo

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkɑːɡəʊ//
  • United States//ˈkɑɹɡoʊ//

Freight carried by a ship, aircraft, or motor vehicle.

noun

  1. 1

    Freight carried by a ship, aircraft, or motor vehicle.

    The plane was overloaded with cargo. It was a cargo of live animals.

    "[…]her whole and entire cargo; and, also, all such other cargoes and property as may have been landed in the island of Teneriffe,[…]"

    "[…]but human life is worth more than ships or cargos."

    How will heaven be filled if the earth ceases to send its cargoes?

  2. 2

    Western material goods.

    The principal change was that two of the 'satans', Kilibob and Manup, were now identified by different groups as God and Jesus Christ, as cargo deities. This expressed the return to hostility towards Europeans and a reassessment of native rights to the cargo.

    In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult.

    Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their undoubted developmental disadvantage, ended up with much more of the cargo?·

    He was the only one to tell me that he thought it was possible that cargo was made by the ancestors. One or two others were noncommittal, but most clearly denied it.

Etymology

Borrowed from Spanish cargo (“load, burden”), from cargar (“to load”), from Late Latin carricō. Doublet of charge and carga. Displaced native Old English fearm.

verb

  1. 1

    To load with freight.

Forms

plural
cargos, cargoes
past tense
cargoed
past participle
cargoed
present participle
cargoing
third person singular
cargos
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).