cargo

Borrowed from Spanish cargo (“load, burden”), from cargar (“to load”), from Late Latin carricō. Doublet of charge and carga.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑːɡəʊ/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑɹɡoʊ/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)ɡəʊ
• Hyphenation: car‧go

cargo (countable and uncountable, plural cargos or cargoes)

1. Freight carried by a ship, aircraft, or motor vehicle.

   The plane was overloaded with cargo. It was a cargo of live animals.

   • 1806, James Harrison, The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson:

     " […] her whole and entire cargo; and, also, all such other cargoes and property as may have been landed in the island of Teneriffe, […] "

   • 1913, Nephi Anderson, Story of Chester Lawrence:

     " […] but human life is worth more than ships or cargos."

   • 2005, J. M. Coetzee, “Five”, in Slow Man, New York: Viking, →ISBN, page 34:

     How will heaven be filled if the earth ceases to send its cargoes?

   • 2016 February 1, Tom Whipple, “Microcannon firing nanobullets: the future of targeted medicine”, in The Times‎^[1]:

     A battery of several microcannons can be used to fire the drug cargoes at different times and different depths.
     “We have been working on nanomachines over the past decade,” Joseph Wang, chairman of nanoengineering at UCSD, said. “One of the challenges we considered is to deliver therapeutic cargo deep.

2. (Papua New Guinea) Western material goods.
   • 1964, Peter Lawrence, Road Belong Cargo:

     The principal change was that two of the 'satans', Kilibob and Manup, were now identified by different groups as God and Jesus Christ, as cargo deities. This expressed the return to hostility towards Europeans and a reassessment of native rights to the cargo.

   • 1995, Martha Kaplan, Neither Cargo Nor Cult:

     In this study of colonial and postcolonial Fiji, Martha Kaplan examines the effects of narratives made real and traces a complex history that began neither as a search for cargo, nor as a cult.

   • 1998, Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, page 22:

     Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their undoubted developmental disadvantage, ended up with much more of the cargo?·

   • 2002, Dorothy K. Billings, Cargo Cult as Theater: Political Performance in the Pacific, page 60:

     He was the only one to tell me that he thought it was possible that cargo was made by the ancestors. One or two others were noncommittal, but most clearly denied it.

   • 2004, Lamont Lindstrom, “Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium”, in Holger Jebens, editor, Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique:

     People turned to traditional or innovative religious ritual to obtain "cargo."

   • 2019, Lamont Lindstrom ·, Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond, page 5:

     And beyond anthropologists and Islanders, others have been enchanted by cargo as well.

cargo (third-person singular simple present cargos, present participle cargoing, simple past and past participle cargoed)

1. (transitive) To load with freight.

• Cogar, Crago

Borrowed from English cargo.

• IPA^(key): /kaʁ.ɡo/

• Audio:

  (file)

cargo m (plural cargos)

1. ship designed to carry a cargo

• “cargo”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

cargo

1. first-person singular present indicative of cargar

• IPA^(key): /ˈkar.ɡo/
• Rhymes: -arɡo
• Hyphenation: càr‧go

cargo m (plural carghi)

1. cargo boat
2. freighter (boat or plane)

• Hyphenation: car‧go

cargo m (plural cargos)

1. post, occupation, profession
2. office; responsibility

cargo m (genitive singular cargo, plural cargothan)

1. alternative form of carago

• IPA^(key): /ˈkaɾɡo/ [ˈkaɾ.ɣ̞o]
• Rhymes: -aɾɡo
• Syllabification: car‧go

Deverbal from cargar.

cargo m (plural cargos)

1. charge, burden
2. position, post
3. (finance) debit
4. (heraldry) charge

cargo m (plural cargos, feminine carga, feminine plural cargas)

1. higher-up

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

cargo

1. first-person singular present indicative of cargar

• “cargo”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 10 December 2024

cargo (feminine singular carga, masculine plural cargi, feminine plural carge)

1. loaded, laden
2. charged
3. full