A bargain, an exchange. To Trade or to Trade off. To exchange.
1806. The words buy and sell are nearly unknown here [in Erie, Pennsylvania]: in business nothing is heard but the word trade.… But you must anticipate all this from the absence of money.—Thomas Ashe, ‘Travels in America,’ i. 112 (Lond., 1808). (Italics in the original.)
1819. [He said] he had in his waggon a few notions, for which he had traded his potash.—“An Englishman” in the Western Star: Mass. Spy, May 12.
1829. When the business was completed, there was about an even trade between Mr. A. and Farmer G.—Mass. Spy, March 18: from the Christian Intelligencer.
1830. The bargain was concluded, the money paid, and the purchasers satisfied that they had made the best trade.—Mass. Spy, Nov. 24.
1836. They would bribe some vagabond Indian to personate him in a trade, to sell his land, forging his name.—Mr. Peyton, House of Representatives, Dec. 15: Cong. Globe, p. 270, App.
1846. Somebody proposes to trade off Oregon for the tariff. Sir, I will stand no trade of that kind.—Mr. Thompson of Pa., the same, Jan. 28: id., p. 159, App.
1846. In a trade, however, they [the trappers] are as keen as the shrewdest Yankee that ever peddled clocks or wooden nutmegs.—Edwin Bryant, ‘What I saw in California,’ p. 112–3 (N.Y.).
1847. The value of fourteen dollars in trade would buy an ordinary horse.—Joel Palmer, ‘Journal,’ p. 127 (Cincinnati).
1848. The Yankees were said to have some talent at a trade, but here was a specimen of Tennessee ingenuity which distanced them.—Mr. Smith of Conn., House of Repr., March 2: Cong. Globe, p. 416.
1854. Every girl in Boston, who is old enough to work in a printing office, has a lover whom she would be just as likely to trade off for a Tennessee article as she would be to swap him off for a grizzly bear.—‘The Olive Branch,’ Boston, n.d.
1857. Women are better’n men, and always get the little end of the trade, when they get married.—J. G. Holland, ‘The Bay-Path,’ p. 172.
1857. See BANTER.
1864. I meekly carried it [the silk] back, and begged the smirking clerk to take it again, promising to trade it out in some other way.—J. G. Holland, ‘Letters to the Joneses,’ p. 183.
1867.
| Generous by birth, and ill at saying ‘No,’ | |
| Yet in a bargain he was all men’s foe, | |
| Would yield no inch of vantage in a trade, | |
| And give away ere nightfall all he made. | |
Lowell, ‘Fitz-Adam’s Story,’ Atlantic Monthly, January. |
1888. Our orderly has perfected a trade for a beautiful little horse for me.—Mrs. Custer, ‘Tenting on the Plains,’ p. 187.
