Rout

How to spell rout

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rout

What does rout mean?

1. nounA decisive, crushing defeat, often one that ends in disorderly retreat.
2. verbTo defeat decisively and force into a chaotic retreat.
3. verbTo gouge, hollow, or force something out, as with a tool or by searching.

Rout in a sentence

• noun

  The final score turned the match into a complete rout.

• verb

  The home side managed to rout their rivals by thirty points.

• verb

  He used the power tool to rout a clean groove along the edge of the shelf.

• noun

  The army's collapse became a rout once the supply lines were cut.

• verb

  A single bold charge can rout a much larger but disorganised force.

• verb

  Inspectors arrived early to rout out the source of the leak.

Where does rout come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb rumpere, meaning 'to break', whose feminine past participle was rupta, literally 'broken'. In Old French this became route, which carried the sense of a body of troops that had been broken apart and scattered, as well as the related notion of a band or company. English borrowed it in the 1300s, and over time the spelling settled on 'rout' for the idea of a crushing defeat and a panicked, disorderly flight, while the closely related sense of a 'broken' or cut path survived separately as 'route'. That shared Latin ancestor is exactly why rout, route, and even 'rupture' all feel connected, and why the look-alike 'route' is such an easy trap when writing 'rout'. A second, mostly unrelated sense of rout, meaning to dig, gouge, or force something out (as a pig roots in the soil, or as a woodworker hollows wood with a router), comes from an old Germanic root for rooting and was later spelled to match.

How the word is built

• rout (from Old French route, a breaking up of a body of troops, from Latin rupta, broken)