porter

The word “porter” means a person employed to carry luggage or goods, especially at a station, airport, or hotel. In plain terms, someone paid to carry luggage or guard a building's entrance, or a type of dark beer.

“Porter” is pronounced PAW-tuh (/ˈpɔɹtɚ/ in IPA).

Here is “porter” used in a sentence: “The porter carried our bags up to the room.”

“Porter” is a noun.

The word “porter” comes from Latin. From Old French porteor, from Latin portare ("to carry"), formed as "port" (carry) plus the agent suffix "-er". The beer, originally popular with London street porters, takes its name from the same word.

“Porter” is a fairly common word in modern English.

“Porter” has 3 distinct senses listed in this dictionary. The most common is: a person employed to carry luggage or goods, especially at a station, airport, or hotel.

As beers, porter is a strong, dark beer similar to a stout but generally lighter in body. The two styles are closely related and overlap considerably, so fullness and richness of body, with stout usually the heavier, are the practical differences most drinkers notice.

A porter is employed to carry luggage or goods for passengers or guests, especially at a station, airport, or hotel. In some buildings, a porter instead staffs and controls the entrance, a role closer to a doorkeeper.

Both carry luggage for guests, but bellhop is the usual American term for the hotel employee who takes bags to rooms. Porter is the more general and more British word, and it also covers workers who move luggage at stations and airports.

A doorman primarily attends the door of a building, greeting people and controlling who enters. Porter overlaps with this, since one sense of porter is a person who staffs and controls the entrance to a building, but porter also commonly means someone employed to carry luggage or goods, which a doorman is not.