Sidewalk

How to spell sidewalk

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sidewalk

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sidewalk mean?

1. nounA paved path for pedestrians running alongside a street, separated from the road used by vehicles.

Sidewalk in a sentence

• The cafe set out a few tables on the sidewalk for summer.

• City crews repaired the cracked sidewalk outside the office.

Where does sidewalk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sidewalk is a transparent compound built from two very old native English words. 'Side' descends from the Old English 'side', meaning the edge, flank, or long margin of a thing, while 'walk' comes from the Old English verb 'wealcan', which originally meant 'to roll' or 'to toss' and only later settled into the sense of moving on foot and then the path one moves along. The two were joined in the early 1700s to name a paved footpath running along the side of a street, set apart from the roadway used by carriages and traffic. The word took firm root in North American usage, where it remains the standard term, while British English instead settled on 'pavement' for the same thing. Because both halves are spelled exactly as the familiar standalone words, the compound holds no hidden trap; the only thing to remember is that it is written as a single solid word, not two.

How the word is built

• side (edge, margin)
• walk (path for walking)