Subway

How to spell subway

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce subway

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does subway mean?

1. nounAn underground urban railway system for passengers.
2. nounAn underground passage allowing pedestrians to cross beneath a road or railway.

Subway in a sentence

• She takes the subway to work every morning to avoid the traffic.

• Use the subway to cross safely under the busy ring road.

• The city expanded its subway with three new stations downtown.

• The dimly lit subway beneath the station was recently repainted.

Where does subway come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound made from two parts: the Latin-derived prefix sub-, meaning 'under' or 'beneath', and the native English word 'way', which descends from the Old English weg, meaning a road, path, or route. The word was assembled in English itself rather than borrowed whole, appearing in the nineteenth century to describe a passage running underneath something. In British usage it settled on the meaning of a pedestrian tunnel passing beneath a road or railway, while in American and Canadian usage it came to name the underground urban railway, first used of such a system in Boston around 1897. The spelling is mercifully regular: it is simply 'sub' joined directly to 'way' with no linking letter, and the silent trap many imagine is not there. The same sub- prefix that means 'under' here also gives us submarine, subterranean, and submerge.

How the word is built

• sub- (under, beneath)
• way (a route or path, from Old English weg)