FOB is one of the Incoterms rules, owned and published by the International Chamber of Commerce. In broad terms it puts on the seller the cost and risk of getting the goods to the named port of shipment and on board the vessel, with risk passing to the buyer once they are aboard. The recurring trap is that FOB was written for sea and inland waterway carriage, where the seller controls the goods right up to loading. It is routinely used for containerised cargo, where the seller in fact hands the box over at a terminal days before it is loaded and has no control over it in the interval — leaving a gap in which neither party holds the risk position they think they hold. A different Incoterms rule fits that case.
Why nothing is quoted here. This lexicon quotes only text it has actually read, from the body that issued it. The instrument described above has a real owner, named in the paragraph, but that owner does not publish the operative wording openly, and reproductions circulating on brokers’, carriers’ and consultants’ websites are not the issuing body’s publication and are not treated as the source. So this entry describes the instrument’s role and structure and stops there. For the wording that will actually govern your transaction, go to the issuing body — and read the version your contract incorporates, since these texts are revised.