Road

How to spell road

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce road

What does road mean?

1. nounA wide prepared track or surface for vehicles and people to travel along between places.

Road in a sentence

• The council resurfaced the main road through the village.

• Heavy snow closed the mountain road for three days.

Where does road come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Road comes from the Old English word rad, which literally meant 'a riding' or 'a journey on horseback', and it grew directly out of ridan, the ancestor of the modern verb 'ride'. For centuries the word referred to the act of travelling rather than to the strip of ground itself, a sense still preserved in the old phrase 'inroad' and in the naval term 'roads' or 'roadstead' for a sheltered place where ships ride at anchor. The familiar meaning of a prepared track for travelling between places only became dominant in the 1500s, perhaps helped along by Shakespeare's frequent use. Because road and the past tense 'rode' both descend from that same riding root, they sound identical and are easily swapped in writing, so the trap is meaning rather than sound. The further homophone 'rowed', meaning propelled a boat with oars, comes from an entirely separate Old English word and simply collided in pronunciation.

How the word is built

• road (whole word from Old English rad: a riding, journey)

Words that sound like road

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• rode: The past tense of 'ride': sat on and controlled, or travelled in, a moving animal or vehicle.