Street

How to spell street

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce street

What does street mean?

1. nounA public road in a town or city, usually lined with houses or buildings.

Street in a sentence

• The shops on our street close early on Sundays.

• They bought a flat on a quiet residential street.

Where does street come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word street is one of the oldest borrowed words in English, taken into Old English as 'stret' or 'straet' long before the Norman Conquest. It comes from the Late Latin phrase 'via strata', meaning 'a paved way', where 'strata' is the past participle of the verb 'sternere', 'to spread out' or 'to lay down'. The Romans built carefully layered, paved roads across their empire, and the word for these surfaced ways spread to the Germanic peoples who lived along the frontier. That same Latin 'strata' also gives us the unrelated-looking words 'stratum' and 'stratosphere', all sharing the idea of something laid out in layers. Because the word arrived so early and settled into everyday Germanic speech, its spelling has long been fixed and rarely troubles modern writers.

How the word is built

• stret- (from Latin strata: paved way)
• -t (English adaptation of the borrowed form)