cargo

Pluralcargos, cargoes

Formscargos, cargoing, cargoed

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The goods that a ship, aircraft, or motor vehicle transports.

   The freighter left port with cargo bound for Rotterdam.

   Airlines charge by weight for any cargo carried in the hold.

   Similarfreight, load, shipment, consignment

   Note

   A Spanish loan that keeps its first meaning: Spanish cargo is a load or burden, from cargar, "to load", and English charge descends from the same Late Latin root. The plural goes both ways, with Coetzee writing cargoes in 2005 and Nephi Anderson cargos in 1913. Use it uncountably for freight in general (overloaded with cargo) and countably for a single shipment (a cargo of live animals).

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To load a ship, aircraft, or vehicle with freight.

   Dockhands cargoed the vessel through the night to catch the morning tide.

   An experienced ground crew can cargo two aircraft in under an hour.

   Similarload

   Oppositeunload

3. 3
   noundialectalPapua New Guineauncountable

   Material goods from Western societies, such as manufactured tools, clothing, and packaged food.

   Followers of the movement built airstrips in the jungle, believing cargo would descend from the sky for them.

   The missionaries' crates of cargo convinced some villagers that ritual, not labor, was the source of such wealth.

   Note

   In Papua New Guinea English the word names the whole stock of Western manufactured wealth rather than a ship's freight. It is bound up with the cargo cults, whose followers held that right ritual or the ancestors would deliver such goods. Dorothy Billings records villagers asking whether cargo was made by the ancestors, and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1998) asks why Europeans ended up with more of the cargo.

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