Street, Road, etc.
That leaves my favorite of such “street” terms, “boulevard.” Like “avenue,” “boulevard” entered English from French, which had adopted the word from the Dutch “bolwerk,” meaning “fortified wall, rampart” (which also produced the English word “bulwark”). In French the word originally just meant “fortified wall, as around a castle,” and more particularly the walkway around the top of such a wall. Eventually, however, “boulevard” came to mean the sort of broad promenade often built on the remnants of ruined fortifications in Europe, and was still later generalized to mean a broad, graceful, multi-laned avenue in a city.
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Tim Brooks:
July 26th, 2021 at 6:31 am
I think your origin of ‘Highway’ is maybe not correct.
Frequently the quickest summer route between two places would be a ‘low road’ following the valley bottom as far as possible (it takes a lot of energy to climb hills).
However, in the winter this route would be impassable due to waterlogging, and the ‘high road’ would take you past the boggy bits.
As turnpikes and similar carriage routes were introduced, and were expected to be open thoughout the year, so wherever necessary they would avoid the boggier bits of the low roads (probably not all as better drainage had increasingly improved the situation), and this is where the word ‘highway’ probably originated, so contra to your statement, it does refer to height.