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• underground railroad
  underground railroad

  noun

  a railroad running through a continuous tunnel, as under city streets; subway.
• Underground Railroad
  Underground Railroad

  A network of houses and other places that abolitionists used to help slaves escape to freedom in the northern states or in Canada before the Civil War. The escaped slaves traveled from one “station” of the railroad to the next under cover of night. Harriet Tubman was the most prominent “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

underground railroad

American  

noun

1. Also called underground railway.  a railroad running through a continuous tunnel, as under city streets; subway.

2. (often initial capital letters) (before the abolition of slavery) a system for helping African Americans fleeing slavery to escape into Canada or other places of safety.

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underground railroad British  

noun

1. (often capitals) (in the pre-Civil War US) the system established by abolitionists to aid escaping slaves

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Underground Railroad Cultural  

1. A network of houses and other places that abolitionists used to help slaves escape to freedom in the northern states or in Canada before the Civil War. The escaped slaves traveled from one “station” of the railroad to the next under cover of night. Harriet Tubman was the most prominent “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

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underground railroad Idioms  

1. A secret network for moving and housing fugitives, as in There's definitely an underground railroad helping women escape abusive husbands. This term, dating from the first half of the 1800s, alludes to the network that secretly transported runaway slaves through the northern states to Canada. It was revived more than a century later for similar escape routes.

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Etymology

Origin of underground railroad

First recorded in 1825–35

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

underground railroad Underground Railroad

KCK also became a major stop on the underground railroad, escaped slaves gaining freedom the instant they crossed the river into Kansas, an abolitionist state.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 28, 2025

A Black woman, forced into an intimate relationship with the white man who controls her every move, flees to freedom via an underground railroad of sympathetic strangers, and then grapples with what freedom means.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 19, 2024

A route from the North Korean border, running through China and into Southeast Asia, is marked out on it — the underground railroad to freedom for defectors.

From Washington Times ● Nov. 22, 2023

This neighborhood, riddled with underground railroad safe houses and hidden alleyways for a quick escape, was a refuge for those fleeing bondage.

From Scientific American ● Nov. 2, 2023

Impossible as it seemed, the underground railroad had a spur in Georgia.

From "The Underground Railroad: A Novel" by Colson Whitehead

My recitation about the environmental ingenuity of enslaved people in the Underground Railroad was clearly jarring to many in the audience, perhaps even hostile to their understanding of Blackness.

From Salon ● Jun. 19, 2026

The geometric abstraction is assembled from panels of triangles in the “flying geese” style used by quilters that, in legend, would have offered secret maps to those fleeing on the Underground Railroad.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 1, 2026

His mother, who introduced him at age 5 to Walden Pond, was an abolitionist who ran a station on the Underground Railroad, for which he would act as a conductor.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 30, 2026

The United States National Park Service began scrubbing its exhibits about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, but public pressure reversed that erasure.

From Salon ● Aug. 11, 2025

This man was an agent of the Underground Railroad who lived in Cambridge, Maryland.

From "Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad" by Ann Petry