Junction

How to spell junction

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce junction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does junction mean?

1. nounA point where two or more things, especially roads, railways, or routes, meet or join.
2. nounA place where two electrical conductors or components are connected.

Junction in a sentence

• Leave the motorway at the next junction and follow the signs to the airport.

• The electrician housed every cable connection inside a sealed junction box.

• The accident happened at a busy junction where four roads converge.

• A loose wire at the junction was causing the lights to flicker.

Where does junction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb jungere, meaning 'to join' or 'to yoke together', whose past participle was junctus. From that participle Latin formed junctio, literally 'a joining', and that noun passed into English in the early 1700s, partly by way of legal and engineering Latin. The very same jungere root sits beneath a whole family of English words, including 'join', 'joint', 'conjunction', and 'adjunct', and it is even distantly tied to 'yoke', the wooden bar that joins two oxen. Because the Latin junctus kept its hard c sound, the English spelling preserves the 'ct' cluster, which is why we write junction rather than 'junkshun' even though the ear hears no separate 'c'. As the railways and road networks expanded in the nineteenth century, the word settled into its familiar everyday sense of a point where lines or routes meet.

How the word is built

• junct- (from Latin junctus: joined)
• -ion (noun suffix forming 'the act or place of')