Highway

How to spell highway

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce highway

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does highway mean?

1. nounA main public road, especially one connecting major towns or cities.

Highway in a sentence

• The new highway cut the journey to the coast by an hour.

• Heavy snow closed the highway between the two cities.

Where does highway come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Highway is a native English compound that goes back to Old English heahweg, formed from heah meaning 'high' and weg meaning 'way' or 'road'. The 'high' part did not originally describe altitude; it carried the sense of 'chief' or 'principal', so a heahweg was a main public road maintained for everyone, as opposed to a lesser lane or track. This older meaning survives in the legal phrase 'the King's highway' and in 'highway robbery', once a literal crime committed on these busy public roads. Both halves of the word are among the oldest in English and have stayed remarkably stable in spelling for over a thousand years. The spelling trap is simply the silent 'gh' in 'high', a cluster that was once pronounced as a throaty sound but fell silent in modern English while the letters remained.

How the word is built

• high (main, principal)
• way (road, path)