[SERIOUS] What's the definition of a "carry" in World of warcraft?

[Jujudrood]

A carry is simply someone who is undergeared/underperforming in whatever content they are in.
If someone has gear much lower than the content in which they are participating, or if their performance/throughput is vastly lower than what it should be in comparison to others, they are a carry.
It doesn't matter why they are there, whether they paid for boost, they are a returning player needing funneled gear, or the GM's GF who has to have a heal spot even though she has no clue what she's doing and there are 2-3 better heals on the bench/off spec that would increase the odds of a clear substantially.

In terms of many wipes and never getting a kill, that could be that the group brought too many carries and couldn't handle the dead weight, or they themselves are simply not geared/skilled enough to be able to carry any dead weight to begin with.
An attempted carry is still a carry, albeit a shitty one.

[Wuusah]

I mean technically you can get carried and still lose. If there is a race and someone literally carries you to the finish line but in last place, then that person still carried you, even if you didn’t win the race

[Nubulous]

A carry...my 188 ret paladin guildmate on his alt running a 15 mists and we time it in 3 min still lol
Also funny enough to prove how meaningless DPS raider io is up to a certain key level because that third dps can be hard carried/boosted in a ton of runs if the other dps are blasters

[ifrah]

Need to call the international wow standard association on this really. In my books however, a carry/boost (which are we talking about depends in my opinion on the reason for the activity) is in question if the carried/boosted person would not be able to perform the task on his/her own. In case of group content, if 5/25/x number of similar geared/skilled players would fail, it's a positive. Not really definable though, or at least unverifiable.
Internet-rules for carrying are obviously not as relaxed. You lost the top spot on meters by 5%? Carried lulz. Soaked a mechanic and got killed once? Carried again, noob. List goes on.

[Malania]

A carry is a carry, whether you're paying for it or not. They can do the content without you. A boost is something you're capable of doing but are limited in some way (alt doesn't have the gear to do it or something).

Some people consider them to the same thing. They kinda are I guess.

Technically Method can do it since we've seen them do it so it is a carry but apparently an unreliable one. I wouldn't pay for it off them until they're reliable.

[melzas]

In WoD I paid 4 of my guildies to rerun all CM gold dungeons with me again (not a usual boosting price, but enough to make up for the time they spent on achives they already had). We had better timer than what they had with original third DPS, even 4 "realm best" times. Was it a boost? A carry? Something else?

Does it matter?