To tote something is to carry it — usually something with a bit of weight or bulk, and usually as a regular thing rather than once. You tote a bag of books to school every day, a camera around a city, a heavy toolbox from job to job. There is a small flavour of effort and of lugging it about with you, so it fits objects you haul rather than things you slip in a pocket.

It is American, informal, and a little old-fashioned or folksy in feeling — you meet it more in writing, in songs, and in journalism than in a Taiwanese classroom. It is very common in two fixed places, though. One is *tote bag*: a big, flat, open cloth bag with two handles, the kind bookshops and museums sell, which everyone knows. The other is *gun-toting*, used before a noun, meaning carrying a gun — "gun-toting cowboys" — which is almost always a little disapproving or half-joking.

There is also a separate noun *tote*, short for the totalisator at a racecourse — the machine that works out the betting odds — but that is British, narrow, and not what you will meet first.

Where the word came from is genuinely unclear. Some scholars link it to a Low German word for a horn-shaped paper bag; others think it came into American English from an African language brought by enslaved people, comparing Kongo *tota*. Neither story is settled, so an honest teacher says "probably" and stops there.