Mainline

How to spell mainline

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mainline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mainline mean?

1. nounThe principal railway route between major destinations, as distinct from branch lines.
2. adjectiveBelonging to the established mainstream of an organisation, movement, or tradition.

Mainline in a sentence

• noun

  The express train runs along the mainline from the capital to the coast.

• adjective

  She grew up attending a mainline Protestant church in the suburbs.

• noun

  Engineers closed the mainline overnight to replace worn track.

• adjective

  The studio backed only mainline films with broad commercial appeal.

Where does mainline come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a compound formed inside English from two older pieces. The first element, 'main', descends from the Old English noun mægen, meaning 'strength' or 'power', which by the medieval period had also become an adjective meaning 'chief' or 'principal'. The second element, 'line', came into English from the Latin linea, literally a 'linen thread' and so a drawn straight line, arriving partly through Old French. Welded together, 'mainline' first named the principal route of a railway in the nineteenth century, the chief track from which lesser branches split off. From that concrete railway sense the word stretched outward to mean anything central or mainstream, and in twentieth-century American slang it took on the grim meaning of injecting a drug straight into a major vein, picturing the vein itself as the body's main line. Note that the spelling keeps the silent-looking 'ai' of 'main' intact: it is main plus line, never 'mane' or 'mayn'.

How the word is built

• main (chief, principal, from Old English mægen 'strength')
• line (from Latin linea 'thread, line')