/ˈɪmpɔːrt/ (noun) | /ɪmˈpɔːrt/ (verb)
[verb] To bring goods, ideas, or customs into one country from another. It can also mean to carry great meaning or significance, though this use is less common today.
The same Latin root that gave us 'import' also secretly lives inside 'important' — both originally meant carrying something through a doorway.
The story of 'import' begins with two small but powerful Latin words: 'in,' meaning 'into,' and 'portare,' meaning 'to carry.' Together they formed 'importare,' which meant, quite literally, to carry something into a place. The image is vivid and physical — a person hauling goods across a threshold, through a gate, into a city or country. This concrete, bodily sense is the beating heart of the word, and it has never entirely disappeared.
In classical Latin, 'importare' was used both in a practical sense — carrying merchandise into a port or marketplace — and in a more abstract sense, meaning to bring something in from outside, whether that was an idea, a custom, or an influence. The Romans were themselves great importers, drawing goods and knowledge from across their empire, and the word carried the ambition and anxiety of that exchange. To import something was to introduce a foreign element into a familiar world.
The word passed from Latin into Medieval Latin and then into Old French, where 'importer' carried the same dual weight — both physical goods and abstract meanings. By the late 15th century, English speakers had adopted it directly, at first in legal and commercial writing, where the movement of goods between kingdoms was a matter of serious business and taxation. Early English uses often carried a sense of consequence: to import something was not merely to move it, but to bring it in with effect.
Fascinating shifts happened over the following centuries. By the 16th and 17th centuries, 'import' had grown a second life as a word meaning 'to signify' or 'to matter greatly.' When Shakespeare's characters spoke of something being of great import, they were drawing on this deeper Latin root — the idea that carrying something into a space changes that space, gives it new weight. 'It imports no reason,' a character might say, meaning it carries no logical significance. This sense survives today in the noun form: a matter of great import is a weighty matter.
The noun 'importance' and the adjective 'important' grew from exactly this same root — Latin 'importare' → Medieval Latin 'importantem' → early modern English 'important' — all retaining that original sense of something being carried in and therefore mattering. Many people sense that 'important' should mean something that is imported, and in an etymological sense, they are right: what is important is what has been brought in and cannot be ignored. Meanwhile, the commercial sense of 'import' became dominant through the age of global trade, as merchants, empires, and eventually international law standardised the word to describe the movement of goods across borders — the sense we use most often today.