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viaduct

UK/ˈvaɪədʌkt/US/ˈvaɪəˌdʌk(t)/
nounC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,775 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: viaducts

A viaduct is a long bridge of arches carrying a road or railway. A railway viaduct, cross the viaduct, a brick viaduct.

It carries a route across a valley or low ground on a series of arches, where a bridge crosses one gap. Britain's railway viaducts are among the great works of the nineteenth century — Ribblehead has twenty-four arches and took four years and many lives. Note that the word was coined in 1816 on the model of aqueduct, so a viaduct leads a way as an aqueduct leads water.

Rosser1954 at English Wikipedia · Public domain

Definitions of viaduct

  1. 1nounviaductA long bridge of arches carrying a road or railway.C1

    “The viaduct has about twenty-four arches.”

viaduct is a bridge.

Where it comes from

Viaduct was coined in 1816 from Latin via, a road, on the model of aqueduct. It is one of the rare deliberately invented engineering words that stuck.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *weyh₁-

  2. Latin

    via — highway; road

  3. English, today

    viaduct

Coined in 1816, from Latin via (“highway; road”) + - -duct, on the basis of aqueduct.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Buildings & Architecture, Railways

Practise this word

viaduct in the wild

  • A viaduct is a bridge that consists of a series of arches, piers or columns supporting a long elevated railway or road.

    Viaduct

  • Typically a viaduct connects two points of roughly equal elevation, allowing direct overpass across a wide valley, road, river, or other low-lying terrain features and obstacles.

    Viaduct

  • The Supertram route to Meadowhall runs below part of the viaduct on the trackbed of the South Yorkshire Railway line to Barnsley.

    Tinsley Viaduct

  • Several viaducts connect the various segments of Riverside Drive, including the 2,047-foot Manhattan Valley Viaduct between Tiemann Place and 135th Street.

    Riverside Drive (Manhattan)

  • Riverside Drive was extended north to 155th Street in the 1900s, and a viaduct carrying Riverside Drive West between 155th and 161st streets was built in the 1920s.

    Riverside Drive (Manhattan)

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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.