Expressway

How to spell expressway

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce expressway

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does expressway mean?

1. nounA wide road designed for fast traffic, usually with several lanes and limited entry and exit points.

Expressway in a sentence

• Heavy rain on the expressway slowed the morning commute to a crawl.

• The new expressway links the airport directly to the city centre.

Where does expressway come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound, joining 'express' and 'way'. The first element 'express' descends from the Latin expressus, the past participle of exprimere, meaning literally 'to press out'; that sense of pressing or forcing out gave rise to the idea of something direct, definite, and rapid, which is why an express train or express delivery skips the ordinary stops. The second element 'way' is a thoroughly native English word, going back to the Old English weg, meaning a road, path, or course of travel, and related to the verb for movement seen in 'wagon' and 'wend'. The two were welded together in the United States in the early twentieth century, around the 1940s, to name a high-speed divided road built for through traffic. The spelling trap is simply that it is one solid word with a doubled letter pattern: the 'ss' of express runs straight into 'way' with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• express (fast, direct, from Latin expressus)
• way (road, route, from Old English weg)