Turnpike

How to spell turnpike

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce turnpike

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does turnpike mean?

1. nounA main road or highway on which travellers must pay a toll.

Turnpike in a sentence

• We paid four dollars to drive the length of the turnpike.

• Heavy traffic on the turnpike delayed our arrival by an hour.

Where does turnpike come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound that joins 'turn' with 'pike'. The 'pike' here is the old word for a long staff with a pointed end, and in the late medieval period a 'turnpike' literally named a spiked barrier or frame that could be turned to block a road, a kind of revolving gate that controlled who passed. By the 1600s and 1700s the sense had shifted to the road itself, because trusts in Britain set up such gates to collect money from travellers and used the income to maintain the highway. From that practice the word came to mean a toll road, a meaning that crossed the Atlantic and stuck firmly in American usage, where a turnpike is now a major toll highway. The spelling stays helpfully transparent: it is simply the everyday words 'turn' and 'pike' written together, with no silent letters or hidden roots to trip the writer.

How the word is built

• turn (from Old English turnian, to rotate)
• pike (a pointed staff or barrier)