route
Americannoun
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a course, way, or road for passage or travel.
What's the shortest route to Boston?
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a customary or regular line of passage or travel.
There's a ship from our company on the North Atlantic route.
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a specific itinerary, round, or number of stops regularly visited by a person in the performance of their work or duty.
a newspaper route;
a mail carrier's route.
verb (used with object)
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to set the path of.
to route a tour.
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to send or forward by a particular course or road.
It's the post office's job to route mail to its proper destination.
idioms
noun
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the choice of roads taken to get to a place
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a regular journey travelled
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(capital) a main road between cities
Route 66
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mountaineering the direction or course taken by a climb
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med the means by which a drug or agent is administered or enters the body, such as by mouth or by injection
oral route
verb
Usage
When forming the present participle or verbal noun from the verb to route it is preferable to retain the e in order to distinguish the word from routing , the present participle or verbal noun from rout 1 , to defeat or rout 2 , to dig, rummage: the routeing of buses from the city centre to the suburbs . The spelling routing in this sense is, however, sometimes encountered, esp in American English
Other Word Forms
- misroute verb (used with object)
- preroute verb (used with object)
- reroute verb
Etymology
Origin of route
First recorded in 1175–1225; Middle English: “way, course,” from Old French, from Latin rupta (via) “broken (road),” feminine past participle of rumpere “to break”; rout 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
"We were young and dumb and had summit fever and really wanted to do that route and we continued anyways," Rebekah, a nurse, says.
From BBC
Brokers said a loaded supertanker chartered by Shell that was supposed to cross the Strait of Hormuz had idled, while another was racing through the strait en route to South Korea.
Oil tankers in the Persian Gulf have diverted from their routes amid fears of escalation, the Journal reported.
From Barron's
As the camera follows a suburban Chicago street sweeper along its early morning route, it stops at a modest house, perched on the other side of the train tracks.
From Salon
Fakhar, restored to open after batting in the middle order against England, played his part with some crisp ball striking en route to 84 off 42 balls.
From BBC
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
