route

[root, rout]

noun

1. a course, way, or road for passage or travel.

   What's the shortest route to Boston?

2. a customary or regular line of passage or travel.

   There's a ship from our company on the North Atlantic route.

3. 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.

   Synonyms: circuit, beat

verb (used with object)

routed, routing 

1. to set the path of.

   to route a tour.

2. to send or forward by a particular course or road.

   It's the post office's job to route mail to its proper destination.

route

/ ruːt /

noun

1. the choice of roads taken to get to a place

2. a regular journey travelled

3. (capital) a main road between cities

   Route 66

4. mountaineering the direction or course taken by a climb

5. 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

1. to plan the route of; send by a particular route

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of route¹

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of route¹

C13: from Old French rute , from Vulgar Latin rupta via (unattested), literally: a broken (established) way, from Latin ruptus broken, from rumpere to break, burst

Idioms and Phrases

Idioms

1. go the route,

   1. to see something through to completion.

      It was a tough assignment, but he went the route.

   2. Baseball. to pitch the complete game.

      The heat and humidity were intolerable, but the pitcher managed to go the route.

Example Sentences

It said this was due to "DNS issues" - the same route cause of the huge Amazon Web Services outage last week.

Read more on BBC

“She was just so lost and couldn’t find the route back,” says Brady Riggs, her coach.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Several people told me I shouldn’t miss the Pacific Valley Bluff Trail, a flat route that begins just north of Sand Dollar Beach.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

In his early days, loaders had to learn the details of a driver’s route and load packages in a way that made it easy for the driver to find them in the truck.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Djibouti has only around one million inhabitants but lies on the strategic trade route of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait on the Red Sea.

Read more on Barron's

Related Words

• avenue 
• course 
• direction 
• itinerary 
• journey 
• line 
• passage 
• road 
• track 
• trail 
• way