Bypass

How to spell bypass

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bypass

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bypass mean?

1. verbTo go around, avoid, or skip something rather than passing through or dealing with it directly.
2. nounA road that carries traffic around the edge of a town instead of through its centre.
3. nounA surgically created channel that diverts blood or other flow around a blocked or damaged part of the body.

Bypass in a sentence

• verb

  The new road lets drivers bypass the busy town centre entirely.

• noun

  The council finally approved funding for the long-awaited ring bypass.

• noun

  The surgeon recommended a triple heart bypass after the scan.

• verb

  Clever users can bypass the login screen with a stored password.

• noun

  Taking the bypass shaved twenty minutes off the morning commute.

• noun

  His recovery from the gastric bypass took several weeks.

Where does bypass come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a compound built entirely from English elements, joining the old adverb and prefix 'by', meaning 'beside' or 'past', to the verb 'pass'. The 'pass' half travelled into English through Old French 'passer', which descended from the Latin 'passus', meaning 'a step' or 'a pace', so the literal sense is something like 'to step past the side of'. As a noun for a road built around the edge of a town it appears in the early twentieth century, when motor traffic made it useful to route vehicles around congested centres. The surgical sense, an alternative channel created for blood, was borrowed from that road imagery in the mid twentieth century. The spelling is reliably regular, with the only mild trap being whether to double the 's', which it does, mirroring the parent verb 'pass'.

How the word is built

• by- (beside, around)
• pass (from Latin passus 'step, pace', via Old French passer 'to go past')