Something that is laden seems to be, or actually is, weighed down by the large amount of whatever it’s carrying: tree branches laden with fruit bend toward the ground; newspaper articles laden with technical jargon are hard to read; and sugar-laden cereal is very, very sweet. Laden has been used as an adjective to describe heavily loaded things for a millennium, but its source is an even older verb: lade, meaning primarily "to load something." Lade today mostly occurs in contexts relating to shipping; its related noun lading may be familiar from the phrase bill of lading, which refers to a document listing goods to be shipped and the terms of their transport. Laden is itself sometimes used as a verb meaning "to load something" (as in "ladening the truck with equipment"), and an adjectival form of that word sometimes appears too, as in "a truck ladened with equipment." Plain old laden is preferred in such cases though: "a truck laden with equipment."
The unpaved state highway cuts through a slough crowded with bald cypress trees laden with Spanish moss and spidery air plants.—Miami Herald Archives, Miami Herald, 20 May 2024 Trucks laden with humanitarian aid began rolling onto the shores of Gaza this week through a temporary pier built by the United States.—Kayla Guo, New York Times, 18 May 2024
Verb
Ships still laden with some 240 tons of aid that arrived just a day earlier turned back from Gaza, according to Cyprus, which has played a key role in trying to establish a sea route to bring food to the territory.—Wafaa Shurafa, Samy Magdy, and Tia Goldenberg, The Christian Science Monitor, 2 Apr. 2024 The retailers’ graveyard is filled with once-proud brands, from upscale department store chain Lord & Taylor to RadioShack to Toys ‘R’ Us to Payless Shoes, all of which were forced into bankruptcy and closure due to the unaffordable debt that private equity owners ladened onto their balance sheets.—Chris Isidore, CNN, 27 Feb. 2024 See all Example Sentences for laden
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'laden.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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