Pedestrian

How to spell pedestrian

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce pedestrian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pedestrian mean?

1. nounA person who is travelling on foot, especially along a road or street.
2. adjectiveLacking imagination or interest; commonplace and uninspired.

Pedestrian in a sentence

• noun

  The council added a crossing to protect every pedestrian at the busy junction.

• adjective

  The reviewer dismissed the novel as pedestrian and forgettable.

• noun

  The driver slowed down when a pedestrian stepped onto the road.

• adjective

  His pedestrian report simply listed facts without any real insight.

Where does pedestrian come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin pedester, meaning 'going on foot' or 'on the ground', which was built on pes, pedis, the Latin noun for 'foot'. In Latin the term also carried a figurative shade: writing or speech that went on foot rather than soaring was plain and prosaic, as opposed to elevated verse. English borrowed the word through French in the seventeenth century, at first largely in that figurative sense of 'commonplace' or 'unremarkable', and only later settled it firmly on the literal meaning of a person travelling on foot. The same pes, pedis root gives us a whole family of foot words such as 'pedal', 'pedicure' and 'biped', and noticing that ped at the front is a useful anchor for the spelling. The trickier stretch is the middle, where the unstressed 'des-tri-an' can blur in speech, so it helps to remember the 'estri' chunk that comes straight from pedester.

How the word is built

• ped- (from Latin pes, pedis: foot)
• -estri- (from pedester: on foot)
• -ian (suffix forming noun/adjective)