roadworthy

adjectiveC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — road sits at #372Too rare in one of the two pools to compare — fewer than 20 uses in speech or in writing

Roadworthy means safe and legal to drive. Barely roadworthy, declared roadworthy, keep the van roadworthy.

It is a legal judgement rather than an opinion, and in Britain the annual test decides it. A car can be roadworthy and still be unpleasant to drive, since the standard is safety and not comfort.

Definitions of roadworthy

1adjectiveroadworthySafe and legal to drive.C1
“The old estate was still roadworthy at two hundred thousand miles.”

roadworthy is a quality.

Where it comes from

Middle English
rode
English
road
English, today
roadworthy

Built from

rade · Middle English — ride, journey

From road + -worthy. road comes 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

Practised in Vehicles & Machines

Practise this word

roadworthy in the wild

Capable of travelling 100 km on 1 litre of diesel, with a fully charged battery, the XL1 was both roadworthy and practical.
Volkswagen 1-litre car
Cars four years of age and older are required to be checked every year, to make sure they are roadworthy.
Motoring regulations in Belgium
Contemporary testers felt that the Buick Riviera, Pontiac Grand Prix, and Chrysler 300K were substantially more roadworthy cars, but the Thunderbird retained its leading market share.
Ford Thunderbird (fourth generation)
Only one unit was produced in 1961 and it is the largest roadworthy motor vehicle ever built in the Nordic countries.
Sisu K-50SS
The first of the four, De Snelheid, arrived in the Netherlands in May 1839 and was made roadworthy in July 1839.
Snelheid (locomotive)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the rade family

road

roadworthy — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

← Vocabulary