highway
Americannoun
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highways
plural
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a main road, especially one between towns or cities.
the highway between Los Angeles and Seattle.
- Synonyms:
- interstate, thruway, freeway, expressway
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any public road or waterway.
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any main or ordinary route, track, or course.
noun
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a public road that all may use
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law a main road, esp one that connects towns or cities
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a main route for any form of transport
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a direct path or course
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of highway
before 900; Middle English heyewei, Old English heiweg. See high, way 1
Compare meaning
How does highway compare to similar and commonly confused words? Explore the most common comparisons:
Explanation
A highway is a busy road with many lanes. Highways are usually the quickest route for driving between one city and another. Highways were originally built to connect cities and towns, and since they're wide and have high speed limits, they decreased the travel time. Highways are always considered public land, and they're usually maintained by the individual state. The Old English precursor was heahweg, "main street" or "main way." The word high has often been used to mean "main" or "major," especially when describing a street.
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.
See Examples For:
Laundry dries outside of a home along the northern highway in Cuba.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 1, 2026
The eye of the storm barreled over the peninsular fishing village of Las Barrancas, which was largely unreachable after a swollen river caused a highway bridge to collapse.
From Barron's ● Sep. 29, 2026
By Monday, the highway had reopened and the campus was calmer, but heavily policed.
From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2026
Potential applications include concrete pavements, highway parapet walls, and sewer pipelines.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 22, 2026
Every night we stay in the same dreary kind of motel off the highway, with a TV bolted to the wall and multiple locks on the door.
From "The Wrong Way Home" by Kate O’Shaughnessy
Over the past two years, he has driven hundreds of miles crisscrossing the region, through back alleys and along highways to tally the condition of poles.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 22, 2026
County sheriffs requested assistance from the California Highway Patrol, the driver led a fleet of law enforcement vehicles on a 40-minute journey of South L.A.’s surface streets and highways.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 4, 2026
They are the internet's hidden highways - bundles of optical fibres on the ocean floor carrying data between continents as pulses of light.
From BBC ● Sep. 3, 2026
Somerville sits along Interstate 93 and Route 28, two major highways, resulting in relatively high levels of traffic-related air pollution.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 30, 2026
They had more or less run amuck and were damming up rivers and flooding highways, filling pastures, even beginning to invade the cities.
From "Woodsong" by Gary Paulsen
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.
