Eastbound

How to spell eastbound

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce eastbound

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does eastbound mean?

1. adjectiveTravelling or directed toward the east.

Eastbound in a sentence

• The eastbound train was delayed by an hour.

• Heavy traffic clogged the eastbound lanes of the motorway.

Where does eastbound come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two older English elements. 'East' descends from the Old English east, which traces back to a Proto-Germanic root meaning 'toward the sunrise', the same idea preserved across German Osten and Dutch oost. The 'bound' here is a quite different word from the 'bound' of leaping or tying; it comes from the Old Norse buinn, the past participle of bua 'to prepare', meaning 'ready to go' or 'destined for'. Sailors and travellers used 'bound for' to mean headed toward a destination, and over time this fused with direction words to give homebound, outbound, and eastbound. The compass-plus-bound pattern became common in the railway and shipping age of the 1800s, when describing a vehicle's direction of travel mattered for timetables and signalling.

How the word is built

• east (compass direction)
• bound (heading toward, from Old Norse buinn 'ready, prepared')