Port (pronounced pohrt (U) or pawrt (non-U))
(1) A
city, town, or other place where ships load or unload.
(2) A place
along a coast in which ships may take refuge from storms; harbor.
(3) A
place designated in law as a point of entry where persons and merchandise are
allowed to pass, by water or land, in and out of a country and where customs
officers are stationed to inspect or appraise imported goods.
(4) The
left-side of a vessel or aircraft, facing forward (formerly called larboard).
(5) Any
of a class of very fortified sweet wines, mostly dark-red, originally from
Portugal.
(6) An
opening in the side or other exterior part of a ship for admitting air and
light or for taking on cargo.
(7) In
machinery, an aperture for the passage of steam, air, water etc.
(8) In
military use, a small aperture in an armored vehicle, aircraft, or
fortification through which a gun can be fired or a camera directed.
(9) In
computer hardware, a physical connection (serial, parallel, USB, SCSI etc) to
which a peripheral device or a transmission line from a remote terminal can be
attached.
(10) In
computer software, an address, part of TCP and the IP stack.
(11) The
raised centre portion on a bit for horses.
(12) A
gate or portal, as in the entrance to a town or fortress (chiefly Scots, now
archaic).
(13) In
Queensland, Australia, an alternative term for suitcase (increasingly rare).
(14) In
computer programming, to modify existing code written for one operating system
so it will run on another; a set of files used to build and install a binary
executable file from the source code of an application.
(15) The
bearing or carriage of one’s self (now archaic, survives as deportment, the
once synonymous portance now obsolete).
(16) An
abbreviation of Portugal for certain purposes.
(17) In
internal combustion engines, an aperture through which (1) the fuel-air mixture
passes to reach the inlet valve(s) to the combustion chamber and (2) exhaust
gasses from the combustion process pass after exiting through the exhaust
valve(s).
(18) In
rowing, a “sweep rower” who rows primarily with an oar on the port side.
(19) In
the sports of curling & lawn bowls, a space between two stones or bowls wide
enough for a delivered stone or bowl to pass through.
(20) In
military terminology (also as “at the high port), to hold or carry a weapon
with both hands so that it lays diagonally across the front of the body, with
the barrel or similar part near the left shoulder and the right hand grasping
the small of the stock; to throw the weapon into this position on the command
“Port arms!”.
(21) In
telephony, to carry or transfer an existing telephone number from one telephone
service provider to another.
(22) In
law, to transfer a voucher or subsidy from one jurisdiction to another (mostly
US use).
(23) In
artisan candle-making, a frame for wicks, the word in this context sometimes
used generally as a device which hold something in place while being worked on.
(24) In
linguistics, an abbreviation of portmanteau.
Pre 900:
From the Old English and Middle English port
(harbor, haven), reinforced by the Old French port (harbor, port; mountain pass), the Old English and Old French
both from the Latin portus (port,
harbor (originally "entrance, passage" and figuratively "a place
of refuge, asylum")) from the primitive Indo-European pértus (crossing (and thus distantly cognate with ford)) from prtu- (a going, a passage), from the root
per- (to lead, pass over) and related
to the Sanskrit parayati (carries
over), the Ancient Greek poros (journey,
passage, way) & peirein (to
pierce, to run through), from the Latin porta
(gate, door), portāre (passage; to
carry) & peritus (experienced),
the Avestan peretush (passage, ford,
bridge), the Armenian hordan (go
forward), the Welsh rhyd (ford), the Old
Church Slavonic pariti (to fly), the Old
English faran (to go, journey) and
the Old Norse fjörðr (inlet, estuary).
The present participle porting, the past participle is ported and the
noun plural is ported.
The meaning "gateway; entrance etc" was from the Old English port (portal, door, gate, entrance), from the Old French porte (gate, entrance), from the Latin porta (city gate, gate; door, entrance), from the primitive Indo-European root per-. The meaning "to carry" was from the Middle French porter, from the Latin portāre (passage; to carry) and is used in this sense still as “ported & porting”; The use is Queensland, Australia to describe a suitcase as “a port” is fading as the use of regional forms diminishes. The circa 1300 use to mean of "bearing, mien" (from circa there was the general sense of "external appearance" which extended by the 1520s to the now-archaic sense of "state, style, establishment") is an adaptation of this in the sense of “how one carries (ie deports) oneself” and survives in the word “deportment” (the once synonymous portance is now obsolete); young ladies at finishing school (a kind of training for husband-hunting) would undertake “deportment class” which apparently really did involve learning to walk with a book balanced on the head so the ideal posture could be learned.
The meaning "left side of a ship" (looking forward from the stern) dates from the 1540s, from the notion of "the side facing the harbor when a ship is docked”. It replaced backboard, larboard & leeboard to avoid confusion with starboard when in oral use, eventually confirmed by regulatory order of the Admiralty order in 1844 and US Navy Department in 1846. The origin of the left-right (larboard/starboard) convention in maritime matters is in the ancient vessels which had a (permanently attached) steering oar on the right, thus dictating the need to moor with the left side parallel with the dock or wharf. The configuration seems to have been standardized in the early vessels of many cultures because the vast majority of the human population seems long to have been right-handed. Starboard was from the Middle English sterbord, stere-bourd & stere-burd, from Old English stēorbord, from the Proto-West Germanic steurubord (the construct of all forms steer + board. The use as an adjective is noted from 1857 but oral use likely pre-dated this. Interestingly, in 1887, a US report noted “port” had replaced “larboard” among all classes of sailors except the whalers harvesting in the Atlantic and South Pacific although the new term was used in the Arctic fleets.
Lindsay Lohan approaching port while sitting slightly to starboard, Vanity Fair photo shoot, Marina del Rey, California, October 2010. The location was the Sovereign, a motor yacht built in 1961 for the film star Judy Garland (1922-1969).
The figurative
sense "place of refuge" is noted from the early fifteenth century, the
phrase “any port in a storm” (any refuge is welcomed in adversity) first
documented since 1749 but it’s likely it was in the oral use of sailors and
others much earlier. The “port of call”
dates from 1810 and is a location scheduled for a visit by a ship; it’s used by
both the military and civil shipping. The
phrase “first port of call” can be either a literal description of the first
place a ship (or by extension other forms of transport) is to visit or
figuratively “the default or usually choice of option”. The porthole (opening in the side of a ship) dates
from circa 1300 and is documented in the terminology of naval architects since
1506; the original use in warships was to describe the embrasures in the side
of the ship through which cannons were fired.
What are now thought of as portholes in ships were (from 1788)
originally called “air-ports” on the basis they were a "small opening in
the side of a ship to admit air and light.
A mid-century modern car port. The car is a Mercedes-Benz (R107) SL.
A portreeve (from the
Middle English port-reve, from the Old
English portgerēfa, the construct
being port (a walled market town) + gerēfa (reeve (a local official)) was
variously a mayor, bailiff magistrate or warder in a port or
maritime town; the equivalent office in inland settlements was the borough-reeve
(mayor). The difference was the specific
duties attached to officials in places with ports. The carport (also as also car-port), an
adaptation of the French porte-cochère,
was formalized in the jargon of architecture in 1939, referring to the practice
of lean-to roofs being added to houses to afford weather-protection to
cars. It had become common practice as
car ownership grew and many properties couldn’t accommodate a separate garage, or
in the case of multiple-vehicle ownership, it couldn’t be enlarged. The carport became a favourite of modernist
architects who tended often to object to space which could be allocated to
people being “wasted” on a car but in the affluent post-war years, became a
class-identifier, the carport thought a symbol of poverty compared with the
integrated or stand-alone double garage.
Portsider (left-handed person) dates from 1913 and was US baseball slang
although, technically, it referred to those who batted left-handed rather than
left-handers per se (as in cricket, there are right-handers who bat
left-handed). The distinction also
existed in boxing, a southpaw originally a fighter who “leads with the left”
rather than a left-hander although that does seem to be the modern use.
Penfords Great Grandfather Rare Tawny gift box, US$244 per 750 ml.
The use to describe
the sweet, dark-red wine was from circa 1695, a shortening of Oporto, the city
in northwest Portugal from which the wine originally was shipped to England (from
O Porto (literally “the port”). French
wines had been preferred in England but various squabbles had for some time
almost excluded them, not least because, with anti-French feeling high during
the reign of Queen Anne (1665–1714; Queen variously of England, Scotland,
Ireland & Great Britain 1702-1714), English politicians ran nasty “don’t
buy French” campaigns. Paul Methuen (circa
1672–1757), the English minister-resident in Lisbon, negotiated a reciprocal
agreement (part of the Methuen Treaty of 1703) whereby low tariffs would be
imposed on Portuguese wines in exchange for a similar accommodation on English
textiles. Portuguese wine merchants
decided to stimulate trade further by spiking port wine with brandy, thereby
increasing the alcohol content which gradually induced a change in the national
taste and accounts for why to this day English port is stronger. The other alcohol-related use is porter, a dark
style of beer developed in London well-hopped beers made from brown malt, or
well-roasted barely. It’s un-related to port
wine or Portugal and gained its eighteenth century name from the popularity the
brew enjoyed among street and river porters, porters in that context being the
people employed to carry or move luggage, freight etc, a use which survives in
hotels, railway stations etc.
Tunnel
port heads
Long
rendered obsolete by modern fuel delivery systems and advances in the
understanding of fluid dynamics, tunnel port heads were an attempt to remove
one fundamental drawback of pushrod-activated valves in overhead valve (OHV)
engines with crossflow cylinder heads: the restriction the pushrod path imposes
on intake port size and shape.
Historically, the shape and size of intake ports was compromised by the
need to make room for the pushrod passing from the centre of the engine to the
valve lifters above the combustion chambers.
This meant it was rarely possible for intake ports to assume what was
thought to be the ideal size and shape for high performance applications.
Ford’s solution in 1965 was a brass tube to house the pushrod, passing directly through the intake port, permitting the port to be as large as possible. Dubbed the “tunnel port”, surprisingly, flow-tests proved the tube was no impediment to gas movement and the design proved successful, both in the Le Mans winning GT40s and the Galaxies on the NASCAR circuits. Those however were big-block 427 cubic inch (7 litre) engines and the sheer size of the things disguised the inherent limitation of huge ports: the reduced velocity of gas-flow at low engine speeds which consequently produced power and torque curves unimpressive except high in the rev-range, where they were impressive indeed. In 1969, needing more power from the small-block (Windsor) 302 cubic inch (4.9 litre) engines used in the Trans-Am series, Ford bolted on tunnel port heads, the results disastrous. Gas flowed effortlessly and top-end power was prodigious but the cars were used on circuits and, unlike the NASCAR ovals, a broad power-band was needed and the tunnel port 302s were forced to operate at engine speeds apparently beyond the block’s capacity to survive. The project was soon abandoned.
1968 Ford Mustang 302 tunnel port, Car & Driver comparison test with Chevrolet Camaro Z/28, March 1968.
However,
the tunnel port 302s have a charisma and retain a cult-following to this day,
the defenders maintaining the failures were only indirectly related to the
innovative heads, citing the oiling system which was inadequate to supply the
bottom end of the engine under the high lateral loads experienced. The early versions sucked in a lot of air
which caused the bearings to starve for lubrication although this was quickly
resolved with the installation of dual-pickup systems. That bottom end was anyway insufficiently
strong to withstand the high engine speeds the tunnel-ports mad possible. Before long, the race drivers were being told
to limit the rpm (revolutions-per-minute (engine speed)) but that defeated the very purpose of the tunnel port. Many also note that the 302 TPs were built on
Ford’s standard engine assembly line whereas the 427 TPs were lovingly
hand-assembled by a dedicated crew in a separate facility. Race teams were used to being able to blueprint
and rebuilt engines to with precise clearances using exactly weighted
components but were told to use the 302 TPs just as they were delivered. There seems no doubt there were quality and
assembly problems with the engines and those who have subsequently (and for
decades) used them in competition (after blueprinting and careful assembly)
have reported a high level of reliability.
1969 Ford Mustang Boss 302.
In 1968 however, Ford’s engineers returned to the drawing board, adapting the canted-valve heads from their new small block V8 (Cleveland or 335 series) to sit atop the 302 Windsor. Their efforts succeeded, the less exotic Boss 302 couldn’t match the tunnel port for top-end power but the torque curve meant it was more suitable for use in the road cars which had to be built in the volume necessary to fulfil the Trans Am homologation rules. It proved a paragon of reliability.
427 FE tunnel-port cylinder head (upper) showing the hollow brass tunnel passing directly through the intake port compared with a standard 427 FE (lower).
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