Supposedly in 1796 the final words of Russian Empress Catherine the Great were: “I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that is his.”

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Kids in the schoolyard trade marbles or mittens but just as often you hear of sports teams trading players.

This sense of trade as an exchange is really fairly new compared with how long the word has been around.  It wasn’t until 1913 that sporting trades are recorded and the sense of a “fair exchange” is less than 100 years older than that.

Yet the word trade has been around since the 1300s.

What has it been doing all this time?

Working backward we can see that trade as “exchange” works easily with the word trade meaning “retail activity” and that’s how we got the “fair exchange” meaning.

More broadly we still talk of “the trades” when speaking of electricians and plumbers.

Similarly specific trades come to mind such as the book trade. A category as broad as this encompasses more than just book stores. It includes the publishers, agents and writers as well.

In these examples the sense is more of a profession than a hawker of goods.

Rolling further back in time the meaning of the word trade moves from a sense of a profession to a sense of something that one is in the habit of doing.

Finally we see the origin of the word trade as being related to the word tread with a meaning of a “path” or “route” regularly taken. This was from Old English and Germanic roots.