Other forms: journeys, journeyed, journeying
A journey is the travelling itself — the hours between leaving and arriving. Three hours on a coach with your bag on your knees, the walk to school in the dark, a long drive north with two stops for petrol.
British English uses it for ordinary travel where American English would say trip: my journey to work, a train journey, have a safe journey. The difference worth holding on to is that a journey is one stretch of going, while a trip is the whole outing including coming home — a day trip to the coast contains two journeys. Travel, with no article at all, is the activity in general: travel broadens the mind. Figuratively a journey is any long process of change, which is why every talent show contestant ends up talking about their journey. And journey is a verb as well, though a bookish one: they journeyed south for three weeks.
1nounjourneyAn act of travelling from one place to another.~86%
“The train journey from London to Edinburgh is very beautiful.”
2nounprocessA long process of change or development in a person's life.~12%
“Learning the language has been a slow journey.”
3verbtravelTo travel, especially over a long distance.~2%
“They journeyed south for weeks before they reached the river.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 8 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
journey is an act of travelling.
Old French jornee came from Vulgar Latin *diurnāta and Latin diurnus, from diēs, day. A journey was originally a day's worth of travelling — as far as you could get between first light and dark. The borrowed word pushed out the native English fær and faru.
Proto-Indo-European
*dyew-
Latin
diurnum
Vulgar Latin
*diurnāta
Old French
jornee
Middle English
journe
English, today
journey
Built from
From Middle English journe, from Old French jornee, from Vulgar Latin diurnāta, from Latin diurnum, from Latin diurnus, from diēs (“day”). Displaced native fær and faru.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA