passport

Pluralpassports

Formspassports, passporting, passported

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An official document that proves a person's identity and nationality, normally required for travel between countries.

   Customs officials examined her passport before stamping it.

   Renewing your passport can take several weeks during busy seasons.

   Note

   The word's parts explain it. It comes from French passeport, built from passer, "to pass", and port, "port": a paper for passing through a port. English also has portpass, which puts the same two pieces in the other order. The verbs that go with it are practical ones. You bring a passport, hand it over and get it back, and officials examine it.

2. 2
   nounfigurativelycountable

   Something that gives a person the means to do or achieve something.

   For many graduates, a degree is a passport to higher earnings.

   Years of hard work became his passport out of poverty.

   Similarkey, ticket, gateway, route

   Note

   The figurative passport is nearly always a passport to something: a career, a circuit, higher earnings. A tenor's voice becomes his passport to the international concert circuit. The image borrows from the document that opens borders. Here a talent or a qualification opens doors instead. Out of works too when the point is escape rather than arrival, as in a passport out of poverty.

3. 3
   nouncolloquialcountable

   Any document that permits entry to or passage through a place.

   The signed permit acted as their passport across the restricted zone.

   A member's badge is the only passport into the private lounge.

   Similarpass, permit, ticket

4. 4
   nouncountable

   An identification document that firefighters surrender when entering a hazardous area and reclaim on leaving, used to track who remains inside.

   The crew chief collected every passport at the entry point before the team went in.

   When the firefighters came out, they retrieved their passports from the board.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To grant automatic eligibility for one benefit on the basis of a person's eligibility for another.

   Receiving the main allowance will passport claimants onto a range of linked benefits.

   Officials decided to passport eligible households into the heating subsidy automatically.

   Note

   Benefits administration uses the verb in the passive: claimants are passported to an entitlement. The Ministry of Justice's Fee Remissions for the Courts and Tribunals (2013) has recipients of Working Tax Credit "automatically passported to a full fee remission." Automatically is its natural partner. Compare the funding sense, where it is money, not people, that gets passported.

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To control how money allocated to a local government is required to be spent.

   The ministry decided to passport the grant strictly for housing repairs.

   Central budgets can passport money so local governments spend it only on agreed services.

   Similarring-fence, earmark

   Note

   A piece of public-finance jargon from Parliament. In the House of Lords debates of 2002 (Hansard), an Act "passported the money directly through to the schools," which left local authorities little discretion. The usual pattern is to passport money through to someone, and the verb is often passive: funds end up "getting passported through" to bus operators. The picture is of money crossing the council unopened.

7. 7
   verbtransitive

   To grant the legal authorization that allows or legitimizes economic activity across national borders.

   European rules once allowed a license in one state to passport a firm into all the others.

   The agreement will passport insurers into neighboring markets without new approvals.

   Note

   This is the EU regulator's version of the idea: authorization in one state carries a firm into the internal market. The gerund is the commonest form, as in rules on "passporting the asset managers' activities" in the Research Handbook on EU Economic Law (2019). Keep it apart from The Guardian's 2022 "forced Russian passporting". There the word means pressing Russian passports on people, not licensing firms.

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