Journey

How to spell journey

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce journey

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does journey mean?

1. nounAn act of travelling from one place to another, especially over a distance.
2. verbTo travel, especially over a long distance.

Journey in a sentence

• noun

  The journey from the airport to the hotel took almost two hours.

• verb

  The explorers would journey for weeks across the open desert.

• noun

  She planned the long journey carefully, booking every train in advance.

• verb

  Every summer they journey north to visit relatives by the coast.

Where does journey come from?

Language of origin: French

Journey traces back to the Latin word diurnus, meaning 'of a day' or 'daily', which in turn came from dies, the ordinary Latin word for 'day'. In Old French this developed into jour, 'day', and from it grew journée, which first meant 'a day's work' or 'a day's travel', the distance a person could reasonably cover between sunrise and sunset. English borrowed the word in the 1200s, originally with that same sense of a single day's stretch of travel, before the meaning broadened to cover a trip of any length. The same jour root still sits visibly inside everyday borrowings like 'journal' (originally a daily record) and 'sojourn', which is one reason the silent, unexpected 'jour' spelling can trip writers who say the word as 'jur-nee'. Remembering that a journey began as a 'day' of travelling helps fix that opening 'jour' in place.

How the word is built

• journ- (from French jour: day)
• -ey (from journée: a day's travel)