freight

Freight comes from Late Middle English freight, a variant of fraught, meaning the transport of goods by water, the cargo itself, or the fee charged for carrying it. That word traces back through Middle Dutch vracht and Old Saxon frāht to a Proto-West Germanic combination of a prefix meaning 'completely, fully' and a root meaning 'possessions, property.'

At its root, the word described being fully loaded or fully provided with goods — the state of a ship stocked for a voyage. Over time this sense of 'fully possessed cargo' narrowed into the more general modern meaning of goods in transit, or the cost of moving them.

Freight is a doublet of fraught — the two words share the same Middle English ancestor, though fraught went on to mean 'filled with' something (often tension), while freight kept closer to its literal cargo sense.