/trɛk/
[noun] A long, difficult journey, especially one made on foot through nature or rough terrain. It can also be used as a verb to describe making such a journey.
Trek entered English through the Great Trek of the 1830s, when Dutch-speaking settlers crossed southern Africa by ox-wagon — and the word travelled with them.
The word 'trek' arrived in English from Afrikaans, the language spoken by the Dutch-descended settlers of southern Africa known as the Boers. In Afrikaans, 'trek' meant 'a journey by ox-wagon' or simply 'to travel' — a practical, everyday word for a people whose lives depended on moving through vast and challenging landscapes. But to understand where the Afrikaans word came from, we need to step back several centuries to the Netherlands.
Afrikaans 'trek' descends directly from Dutch 'trekken', meaning 'to pull, haul, or travel'. That Dutch verb came from Middle Dutch 'trecken', which itself derived from an older Germanic root related to dragging or pulling — the same root that gives us the modern German 'trecken' and is distantly connected to the Old English word 'dragan', which became modern English 'drag'. The original physical sense of pulling or hauling was very concrete: you pulled a wagon, you hauled a load. Over time, in Dutch, the word expanded to mean simply 'to move' or 'to migrate'.
In southern Africa, from the 17th century onward, Dutch settlers used 'trekken' to describe their journeys by ox-wagon across the interior. When these settlers' speech evolved into Afrikaans, the word became 'trek', and it took on a specific cultural weight. The most famous moment that brought this word to English-speaking attention was the Great Trek of 1835–1846, when tens of thousands of Boer settlers — the Voortrekkers, meaning 'those who trek ahead' — left the British-controlled Cape Colony and migrated deep into the African interior. This historical event was so dramatic and widely reported that English-speaking journalists and travellers began borrowing the word 'trek' directly, using it as both a noun and a verb.
By the late 19th century, 'trek' had settled comfortably into British English, carried there largely through colonial literature, newspaper reports, and travel writing about Africa. Writers describing expeditions, missionary journeys, and hunting trips in Africa used the word freely, and readers in Britain adopted it with enthusiasm. It had an exotic, rugged quality that English words like 'journey' or 'march' simply could not match. The word suggested not just distance, but hardship — the slow grind of wheels across dust, the labour of animals and people working together through punishing conditions.
In the 20th century, 'trek' shed most of its specifically African meaning and became a general English word for any long, tiring journey — particularly one made on foot. Hikers began using it for mountain walks, tourists used it for adventurous holidays, and ordinary people used it humorously for any tiresome trip, even a long walk to the shops. The word gained a new layer of global fame in 1966 when the American television series 'Star Trek' was broadcast, using the word to suggest bold, exploratory journeys — this time through space rather than the African savannah. Today, 'trek' sits comfortably in everyday English, still carrying a faint suggestion of effort, adventure, and open ground stretching ahead.