[f. TRUCK v.1 + -ING1.] The action of TRUCK v.1; exchanging, bartering, trafficking, bargaining; dealings, intercourse; also spec. the giving or receiving payment of wages in kind.
1594. Carew, Huarte’s Exam. Wits, xiii. (1616), 216. Manie … by trafficking and trucking, within few dayes haue lost their principall.
1624. Massinger, Renegado, II. vi. Pray you, help me to some trucking With your last she-customer.
1661. Colet’s Serm. Conf. & Ref., II. 27. Unloose your selves from the worldly bondage, from trucking with the world.
1705. Vanbrugh, Confed., II. i. You like your neighbour’s [wife] better…. What a pity it is the law don’t allow trucking.
1755. Ramsay, To Jas. Clerk, 11. To fend by troaking, buying, selling.
1818. Scott, Rob Roy, xxvi. He was here about some Jacobitical papistical troking in seventeen hundred and seven.
1830. Cobbett, Rur. Rides (1885), II. 354. The workman … if he will have liquor,… must get it by trucking with the goods that he has got at the tommy shop.
a. 1867. Sir A. Alison, Autobiog. (1883), I. ii. 30. Our… interchange of little purchases or troking as we called it.
b. U.S. The cultivation of ‘truck’ or vegetables.
1897. Philad. Jrnl. Fine Arts, June. About one half [of the grounds] is used for trucking and pasture purposes.
c. attrib. in sense ‘used for truck or barter,’ as † trucking-cloth, -house, stuff.
1675. in Hubbard, Narrative, I. (1865), 78. He or they … shall receive for their Pains, forty *Trucking-cloth Coats.
1632. Rec. Crt. Assistants Mass. Bay (1904), II. 23. There shalbe a *trucking howse … in euery plantacion whither the Indians may resorte to trade.
1648. B. Plantagenet, Descr. New Albion, 23. To reduce all their trading to five Ports or Pallisadoed trucking houses.
1755. T. Prince, Ann. New Eng., II. ii. (1826), 395. There shall be a trucking house in every plantation.
1624. Good News fr. New Eng., in Arber, Pilgrim Fathers (1897), 533. We were worn out of all manner of *trucking stuff, not having [therefore] any means left to help ourselves by trade.
Trucking vbl. sb.2, see under TRUCK v.2
