route
Americannoun
-
a course, way, or road for passage or travel.
What's the shortest route to Boston?
-
a customary or regular line of passage or travel.
There's a ship from our company on the North Atlantic route.
-
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.
verb (used with object)
-
to set the path of.
to route a tour.
-
to send or forward by a particular course or road.
It's the post office's job to route mail to its proper destination.
idioms
noun
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the choice of roads taken to get to a place
-
a regular journey travelled
-
(capital) a main road between cities
Route 66
-
mountaineering the direction or course taken by a climb
-
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
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
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
-
routesimple
-
routessimple
-
have routedperfect
-
has routedperfect
-
am routingprogressive
-
are routingprogressive
-
is routingprogressive
-
have been routingperfect progressive
-
has been routingperfect progressive
Past
-
routedsimple
-
had routedperfect
-
was routingprogressive
-
were routingprogressive
-
had been routingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of route
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”; cf. rout 1
Explanation
A route is a way for travel or movement, the path from point A to point B. A route can also be the method used for achieving a particular result, like going to school and working hard is your route to success. Route comes from an Old French word, rute, “road,” “way,” or “path” and the Latin rupta, “broken way” or “beaten way.” A route can be a highway, like Route 66, or all the places you pass through on the way somewhere, like using a map to find the shortest route. As a verb, route means "to send people or things on a particular course," like detour signs that route you through unfamiliar streets or a package that is routed through Cleveland on its way to you.
Vocabulary lists containing route
The Best Starting Words for Wordle
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Make a Break for It: Rupt
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American Football, 1st Quarter
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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:
The corps was far more numerous than the populations of the villages on its route; its ravages cleaned out food stores that local peoples counted on for survival.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 2026
Under this route, people must complete 10 years of lawful residence before applying for indefinite leave to remain.
From BBC ● Jul. 27, 2026
A route became dangerous, then known, then avoided.
From Slate ● Jul. 27, 2026
The attack took place several hundred metres away from the end of the tightly guarded CSD parade route and the event's main stage at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate.
From Barron's ● Jul. 26, 2026
Filming began the moment Bobby touched down in Copenhagen, with a camera in the sports vehicle that drove him, Miyoko, and Saemi to Sweden, en route to Iceland.
From "Endgame" by Frank Brady
Nor because professional routes were not an option.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 27, 2026
Changes in sea level sometimes narrowed or removed marine barriers, creating temporary routes that animals could use to move between regions.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 24, 2026
Southeast Asia is itself home to two of the world's busiest shipping routes -- the Strait of Malacca and the Strait of Singapore.
From Barron's ● Jul. 23, 2026
A simultaneous and prolonged disruption of Bab al-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz could affect maritime routes carrying one-quarter of global oil supply, analysts at ship tracker Kpler wrote in a Tuesday note.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 21, 2026
I knew the routes they traced across my head.
From "Ugly" by Robert Hoge
It was that public safety had to be routed through either federal or state policing for the claim to become legible.
From Slate ● Jul. 27, 2026
Tech firms were once again in the crosshairs, with South Korea's Kospi extending a painful selloff as chip titan SK hynix continued to be routed amid growing fears about the AI boom.
From Barron's ● Jul. 14, 2026
Aviation Minister JoBeth Coleby-Davis told reporters a plane had earlier routed back to Nassau when the pilot reported an issue.
From BBC ● Jul. 11, 2026
Some of these countries have routed doctors’ pay through third-country recruitment firms and rebutted assertions of forced labor by documenting that the Cubans keep their own passports and bank accounts.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 9, 2026
“The Rebs routed all across the south as Vicksburg falls to Grant!”
From "Dactyl Hill Squad" by Daniel José Older
Chinese-developed language models account for around 61% of token consumption among top-ten models, according to data from OpenRouter, an API routing platform used by thousands of startups, she said.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 15, 2026
A VPN also adds a layer of protection against government surveillance by both encrypting internet traffic and routing it through secure servers, often located in different countries.
From Salon ● Jun. 10, 2026
“Regardless of the possible merits of new transmission, routing it through the heart of California’s largest state park makes no sense,” said Brendan Cummings, conservation director with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 17, 2026
The Justice Department says that Van Dyke then engaged in a ham-fisted scheme to cover his tracks, routing his profits to a foreign crypto account and asking Polymarket to delete his account.
From Slate ● Apr. 24, 2026
Or we pass around our routing sheet and study the day’s owners’ “Hot Buttons,” as sketched in by Tammy.
From "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
