⚓Demurrage

The charge for a container that overstays its free time at the terminal. The line or the port allows a few days after discharge; after that the meter runs daily. Its cousin, detention, is charged for keeping the box too long once it has left the gate.

The older sense is from ship chartering: money owed to a shipowner when loading or unloading runs past the agreed time.

Origin: Old French demorage, from demorer, to stay or delay, from Latin demorari: de and morari, to delay (mora, a delay, as in moratorium). To demur is the same word: to hesitate.

Where I met it properly: on the dispatch floor at 🏢 Kestrel Cargo during the ✈️ Rotterdam customer visit. I had seen the word in our data for four years. In Rotterdam it was the reason a man was on the phone before his coffee. A delay with a daily price is a different kind of exception.