Route

How to spell route

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce route

What does route mean?

1. nounA way or course taken to get from a starting point to a destination.
2. verbTo send or direct something along a particular course or channel.

Route in a sentence

• noun

  The satnav suggested a faster route to the airport.

• verb

  The network engineer will route the traffic through a backup server.

• noun

  Flooding forced the bus to take a different route through town.

• verb

  Dispatchers route each lorry to avoid the worst congestion.

Where does route come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from Old French route, meaning a road or way, which in turn came from the Latin phrase rupta via, literally a 'broken way', that is, a path forced or beaten through country or forest. The key word there is rupta, the past participle of rumpere, 'to break', the same root that gives us 'rupture', 'disrupt' and 'interrupt'. The original sense was therefore a track cleared by breaking through obstacles, which softened over the centuries into the neutral idea of any course taken from one place to another. English adopted it in the 1200s and kept the French spelling intact, which is why the word ends in a silent -e and is spelled with -ou- rather than the simpler 'root'. That faithful French spelling, combined with the fact that many speakers pronounce it exactly like 'root', is precisely what makes it a recurring trap in writing.

How the word is built

• route (from Latin rupta via, a 'broken' or forced way through); a single unanalysable root borrowed whole, with no prefix or suffix