A load is something that is carried, such as goods on a truck or weight on a person’s back. As a verb, it means to put things onto or into something, like loading a car or a computer program.
It comes from Old English “hladan,” meaning to heap or pile up, and “hlæd,” meaning a burden. The idea of piling weight onto something has stayed central to the word.
We talk about “workload” and “emotional load” as if stress were a physical weight we carry—and our brains often treat it that way. Even computers “load” data, as if they, too, are being weighed down by information.
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