Other forms: termini
A terminus is the station at the very end of a route — the last stop, where the line stops and the train turns round. Euston is a terminus; Clapham Junction is not.
It is a British and formal word; terminal is used for airports and for bus stations, and in American English terminal covers railways too. The plural is termini or terminuses, and neither is common enough for anybody to be confident about it. Note the related family — terminate, terminal, term, determine — all from the same idea of a boundary. In Roman religion, Terminus was the god of boundary stones, which is where the word begins.
1nounterminusThe station at the end of a railway or bus route.
“The train sat at the terminus for twenty minutes.”
synonyms: terminal, end of the line
2nounfinalThe final point of something.
“That decision was the terminus of a long argument.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
terminus is an end point.
Latin terminus meant a boundary marker — a stone set at the edge of a field. The Romans had a god of them and a festival for moving them, and the modern English sense of an end point is the boundary stone still doing its job.
Latin
terminus
English, today
terminus
Learned borrowing from Latin terminus. Latin terminus (“boundary, limit”). a doublet of term and Terminus and termon.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA