transport

Less common meanings

6. 6
   overwhelm (feeling)verbfigurativelytransitive

   To move someone to powerful emotion, carrying them away from ordinary awareness.

   By the final movement, the music had transported the listeners so completely that no one dared to cough.

   Even a few bars of that old hymn could transport her with a joy she could not explain.

   UsageMost often passive with with: transported with joy, transported with delight.

   Similarenrapture, entrance, captivate, enchant

   Note

   Here the carrying is inward: a person is lifted out of themselves by feeling. In Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen, Theseus is "transported with your Speech," and Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) has God's enemies laugh as if he were "transported with some fit / Of passion." The active form survives in praise of art: music transports the soul. The state it leaves behind is the noun for rapture.

7. 7
   burst of feelingnouncountable or uncountable

   A state of being overwhelmed by powerful emotion; rapture.

   In a transport of delight, she danced around the empty room.

   The pilgrims fell into a transport of religious feeling at the shrine.

   UsageMost often in a transport of joy or delight, with at for the cause; also plural: transports of joy.

   Similarrapture, ecstasy, fit, paroxysm

   Note

   The noun takes the verb's emotional lift and makes it a state you are in. It usually goes with in: in a transport of delight, or, in Elisabeth P. Stork's English translation of Johanna Spyri's Heidi, "in her transport at finding such treasures." The tone is literary rather than everyday.

8. 8
   big trucknounCanadacountable

   A large freight truck consisting of a tractor unit pulling a separate trailer.

   A loaded transport blocked two lanes after its trailer jackknifed.

   The depot dispatched another transport to haul lumber north.

   Similarsemi, rig

   Note

   A Canadian name for the big rig: a tractor unit pulling a separate trailer. Speakers elsewhere tend to call the same vehicle a tractor-trailer, so they may read a transport as any vehicle that carries goods. In Canadian use, a jackknifed transport on the highway is simply a truck, not a troop or cargo carrier in the broader sense. Source

   Checked 6 Nov 2026 · 2 facts

   • Canadian English uses transport to mean a tractor-trailer. en.wiktionary.org
   • The vehicle consists of a tractor unit and a separate cargo trailer. en.wiktionary.org
9. 9
   deport (convict)verbhistoricaltransitive

   To send a convicted criminal overseas to a penal colony as punishment.

   The magistrate threatened to transport anyone caught poaching on the estate.

   Authorities chose to transport hundreds of convicts rather than hang them.

   Similardeport, banish, exile

   Note

   A word from the history of punishment, in which a person is sent across the sea as a sentence rather than as cargo. It belongs to accounts of the past and sits most naturally in the passive: a poacher was transported. For modern cases, use deport or exile instead. The convict who was sent away was also called a transport. Source

   Checked 6 Nov 2026 · 2 facts

   • Transportation was a historical punishment involving sending convicted people overseas. nma.gov.au
   • A convicted person sent away was also called a transport. en.wiktionary.org
10. 10
    convictnounhistoricalcountable

    A convict who has been deported to a penal colony.

    Everyone in the town knew that the blacksmith had arrived as a transport, sentenced to fourteen years for stealing a horse.

    Many free settlers would not let their daughters marry a former transport, however well he had done for himself.

    Similarconvict, deportee, exile

    Note

    This noun names the person rather than the punishment: someone who had been transported, so you could speak of a transport or of a hundred transports. It is strictly historical and easy to misread today, when a transport usually means a vehicle. Words like convict, colony and sentence in the surrounding text make the meaning clear. For the practice itself, see the penal verb. Source

    Checked 6 Nov 2026 · 2 facts

    • The noun historically denotes a deported convict, a person rather than the punishment. en.wiktionary.org
    • Transport is countable, with the plural transports. en.wiktionary.org
11. 11
    noun

    The mechanism in a tape recorder or video recorder that moves the recording tape across the read/write heads.