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porter

nounnounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈpɔːtə//
  • United States//ˈpɔɹtɚ//
  • //ˈpo(ː)ɹtɚ//
  • //ˈpoətə//

A person who carries luggage and related objects; (historically) one who carried luggage or did manual labour in the transloading of cargo.

noun

  1. 1

    A person who carries luggage and related objects; (historically) one who carried luggage or did manual labour in the transloading of cargo.

    goods porter

    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.

    the unsmotherable delight of all the porters and by - standers

  2. 2

    An ant having the specialized role of carrying.

  3. 3

    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.

Etymology

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.

noun

  1. 1

    A person in control of the entrance to a building.

  2. 2

    An employee who clears and cleans tables and puts bowling balls away.

  3. 3

    A strong, dark ale, originally favored by porters (etymology 1, sense 1), similar to a stout but less strong.

  4. 4

    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.

Etymology

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

verb

  1. 1

    To serve as a porter; to carry.

Forms

plural
porters
past tense
portered
past participle
portered
present participle
portering
third person singular
porters
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).