Halfway

How to spell halfway

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce halfway

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does halfway mean?

1. adverbAt or to a point equally distant between two places, or only partly to a desired degree.
2. adjectiveSituated at or marking the midpoint between two points or stages.

Halfway in a sentence

• adverb

  The two friends agreed to meet halfway between their two cities.

• adjective

  The runners reached the halfway marker in record time.

• adverb

  The project was only halfway finished when the budget ran out.

• adjective

  A halfway house gives recovering patients a place to live before returning home.

Where does halfway come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English compound, formed from two of the oldest words in the language. The first part, 'half', comes from the Old English 'healf', which originally meant 'side' as much as 'a part divided in two', a sense that survives faintly when we speak of being 'on the half'. The second part, 'way', comes from the Old English 'weg', meaning a path, road, or course of travel, and it is related to words for movement across the wider Germanic family. By the late medieval period the two were being run together to describe a point reached after travelling one half of a distance, and from there the meaning broadened to anything reached or done only partly. The spelling trap is that the two words fuse into one solid form with no space and no hyphen, even though the silent 'l' in 'half' tempts writers to pause where there is no longer a gap.

How the word is built

• half (one of two equal parts)
• way (distance, direction, path)