What a load.
The word is load. Yeah, I’m getting kind of tired.
The word is load. Yeah, I’m getting kind of tired.
Load showed up as a verb in the late fifteenth century but a noun in the early thirteenth century. It comes from the Old English lad, which means way or course. No, I don’t know how it got from one to the other. Maybe from the idea of carrying a load along a path to a destination? But that’s just a guess on my part.
Before that, it comes from the Proto Germanic laitho and Proto Indo European leit, go forth, the origin word for lead. Um, not the metal, the other one. And the word lode actually comes from the same place.
Sources
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
