tollbooth
Americannoun
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a booth, as at a bridge or the entrance to a toll road, where a toll is collected.
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Chiefly Scot. tolbooth.
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of tollbooth
First recorded in 1300–50, tollbooth is from the Middle English word tolbothe. See toll 1, booth
Explanation
The highway kiosk where you stop and pay a fee is called a tollbooth. In the classic novel The Phantom Tollbooth, a boy drives his toy car through a magical tollbooth and is transported to a strange land. If your car has a transponder, a special electronic device, you can drive slowly past a tollbooth and pay automatically, rather than stopping and handing money to a toll collector. Only toll roads or turnpikes have tollbooths — drivers pay based on the size of their vehicle, and the toll revenue contributes to maintaining the road. The oldest tollbooths, called toll houses, were built in England, Wales, and Scotland during the 18th century.
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.
Police can dust a crime scene for fingerprints and get surveillance footage or nearby tollbooth records without identifying the suspect in advance.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 26, 2026
It has come to prominence recently and been dubbed "Tehran's tollbooth" -- a stopping-off point for the handful of vessels that Iran has approved to exit or enter the Gulf.
From Barron's • Mar. 27, 2026
Iran maintained what Lloyd’s List Intelligence called a tollbooth regime over the Strait of Hormuz as diplomatic efforts didn’t generate any tangible results.
From MarketWatch • Mar. 26, 2026
So that when people were driving to D.C., when they stopped at a tollbooth, they were given a piece of paper, told where to go, where to park, what to do.
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 12, 2023
When we pulled up to the tollbooth, the duty officer didn’t even look at us.
From "Summer of the Mariposas" by Guadalupe García McCall
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.
