trucking

1. 1
   nounUSuncountable

   The carrying of freight from place to place by truck, especially as a commercial industry.

   Trucking moves the vast majority of consumer goods within the United States.

   Rising fuel prices squeezed profit margins across the trucking industry.

   Similarhaulage, freight, transport, shipping

   Note

   The everyday American name for the freight business, and the meaning most readers now reach for first. It is the standard term in North American usage, where British English speaks of road haulage. It works constantly as a modifier: the trucking industry, a trucking company, trucking costs. For a mixed audience, the context should make plain that wheels, not barter, are meant.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of truck.

   The company is trucking supplies to the disaster zone around the clock.

   Trucking goods over the mountain pass takes nearly two days in winter.

   Note

   Behind this one form stands a verb with several jobs. It can take an object (trucking supplies, the transitive "convey" meaning) or stand alone (trucking all night, the driver's meaning). The intransitive slang uses for traveling and for persisting carry US and Canadian labels. A separate slang use, meaning to fight, is transitive again. As a gerund it shades into the freight industry noun, and context decides which reading is meant.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   Continuous, brisk movement forward, especially progress kept up at a steady, fast pace.

   Three hours of hard trucking down the highway got them home before midnight.

   The hikers settled into a rhythm of steady trucking up the trail.

   Note

   A spoken word that keeps its dropped g in print: truckin'. Nuclear News (1973) glosses it as "moving along with zest and enjoying it," and that pleasure is what separates it from the plain "walking" sense. In Laura Jacobs's The Bird Catcher (2009), "I was really truckin'" stresses sheer speed. It pairs naturally with really and sits in casual, conversational writing.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   Travel on foot, especially the steady activity of going somewhere by walking.

   Hours of trucking along country lanes left their boots caked in mud.

   A day's trucking around the city wore out her new shoes.

   Similarwalking, tramping, trekking, hiking, trudging

   Note

   Hipster talk that explains itself. Alen Axelrod's The Cheaper the Crook, the Gaudier the Patter (2011) reasons that to truck is to carry, so to truck somewhere is to carry yourself there. Its favorite partner is along, as in Martin Avery's "trucking along." Unlike the "moving fast" sense, it says nothing about speed, only that someone is on foot and on the way.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   The lateral movement of a camera across a scene, shifting the whole camera sideways rather than pivoting it in place.

   The shot opens with a slow trucking past the row of market stalls.

   Camera operators use trucking to keep a walking subject centered in frame.

   Similartracking, crabbing

   Note

   A camera operator's term in which the whole camera travels, usually on a dolly or track, so the scene slides past while the subject stays framed. It is easily confused with panning, where the camera stays in one place and only pivots on its axis. Ask whether the camera itself changed position. If it did, the shot is trucking.

Showing meanings only. Show all 6