Roads

How to spell roads

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce roads

What does roads mean?

1. nounMore than one prepared route or track for vehicles and travellers to move along.

Roads in a sentence

• Heavy rain left the country roads flooded for days.

• The council resurfaced several roads across the town last summer.

Where does roads come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'road', which descends from the Old English 'rad', meaning a riding, a journey on horseback, or a hostile incursion. That noun was built on the same Germanic root that gave us 'ride', so a road was originally the act of travelling rather than the strip of ground travelled on. For centuries the word kept its older senses; the modern meaning of a prepared track for travel only became common in the late 1500s and 1600s, around the time of Shakespeare. The surviving 'inroad' still preserves the early sense of a raid or incursion, and the nautical term 'roads' (a sheltered place where ships ride at anchor) keeps the link to riding alive. The spelling settled with 'oa' for the long vowel, a pattern shared with 'load', 'toad', and 'broad'.

How the word is built

• road (from Old English rad: a riding, journey)
• -s (plural)