Pavement

How to spell pavement

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pavement

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pavement mean?

1. nounA paved path for pedestrians alongside a road.
2. nounThe hard surface of a road or other paved area.

Pavement in a sentence

• The children waited on the pavement until the traffic cleared.

• The motorcycle skidded across the wet pavement near the junction.

• A delivery van had parked across the pavement, blocking the way.

• Summer heat had buckled the pavement on the old highway.

Where does pavement come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word travelled into English from the Latin verb pavire, which literally meant 'to beat down' or 'to ram firm', describing how early road builders pounded earth and stone into a hard, level surface. From that verb Latin formed pavimentum, a beaten or rammed floor, which passed into Old French as pavement before reaching English in the 1200s. For centuries it simply meant any hard-trodden or paved surface, whether a floor, a courtyard, or a roadway. Over time British and American usage drifted apart: in Britain it settled on the paved walkway beside a road, while in America it came to mean the hard surface of the road itself. The quiet trap in the spelling is the unstressed middle, written -ve- where the ear hears nothing distinctive, plus the standard -ment ending rather than any doubled letter.

How the word is built

• pave (from Latin pavire: to beat down, ram)
• -ment (noun suffix denoting result or means)