truck [ME] The truck [L18th] that is a large road vehicle originally meant ‘a wheel or pulley’, and may be a shortening of truckle [LME], which once had the same sense but now only refers to a small barrel-shaped cheese or a truckle bed [LME]. It came from Latin trochlea ‘wheel of a pulley’. To have (or want) no truck with, meaning ‘to avoid dealings with’, has no connection with the transportation of goods; here truck [ME] is from French troquer ‘to barter’. Since the 1920s US English truck has had the slang sense ‘to move or proceed’. Keep on truckin’ was the caption, first used in 1967, of a series of cartoons by the US artist Robert Crumb. See also juggernaut.