Other forms: roads
A road is the hard surface that vehicles travel along between places. The main road, cross the road, a country road.
Road, street, lane, avenue and drive are all used in addresses with no consistent difference. On the road means travelling. The idioms are common: the road ahead, road to recovery, end of the road, all roads lead to Rome, and one for the road. Note roadworks, road rage, roadside; and that in British English you drive on a road rather than in one.
1nounroadA hard surface that vehicles travel along.~98%
“Look both ways before you cross the road.”
2nountowardsA way towards something.~2%
“Hard work is the only road to success.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
road is a route.
Old English rad meant a riding or a journey on horseback — the same root as ride and raid. The surface took the name of the journey, which is why road and ride are so close.
Middle English
rode
English, today
road
Built from
From Middle English rode. From Middle English rode, rade (“ride, journey”), from Old English rād (“riding, hostile incursion”), from Proto-West Germanic raidu, from Proto-Germanic raidō (“a ride”), from Proto-Indo-European reydʰ- (“to ride”). a doublet of raid, acquired from Scots -. Cognates include West Frisian reed (paved trail/road, driveway). The current primary meaning of "street, way for traveling" originated relatively late — Shakespeare seemed to expect his audiences to find it unfamiliar — and probably arose through reinterpretation of roadway (“a way for riding on”) as saying way twice, in other words as a tautological compound.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA