Recently I was trying to explain the Dutch word gracht to a friend and I found myself needing a general word for a unit of architecture which joins two places together. I thought about "route", but for me it is a little too abstract (more of a set of directions to take than a physical entity). Is there such a word in the English language? Moreover, if we also include other, nonlinear things cities are made of (plains, squares, roundabouts — everything that has a name plate on the buildings), is there a word for that too?
Learn English – What’s the general term for street/lane/alley/avenue etc
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Related Solutions
There are categories, and categories of categories, and so on, and any of these categories may or may not have labels already in the language, as Colin pointed out. If a set of words has a word for that set, that word is called a hypernym.
And the semantic category depends on the particular collection you want to name (the collection may not be coherent).
But for these three words, I find that the best encompassing hypernym is
road or roadway,
even though 'road' is one of the things you want as a subcategory, it works as a generalization of them all, a large two-way ...thing... to travel on. (A word that is its own hypernym is an autohyponym or autohypernym). It doesn't have to be paved but a 'path' is too small to be included. I'm not sure about 'alley'. 'Boulevard', 'interstate', 'route', 'lane' are all kinds of roads.
'Street' could be a hypernym by the same reasoning, but as a native speaker, it does not feel like a generalization as much as 'road' does.
The hypernym for these, whether it is 'road' or 'thoroughfare' or something else, is not the same as a word for road names, that is, the things we attach to the name of a road when we say "Go two blocks, turn left at X". These are called odonyms (looked it up just now in Street or road names in Wikipedia). At the end they give a list of such names/odonyms which names you'll notice are not all acceptable as a kind of road (despite the fact that it is acceptable as the name of a road, e.g. 'close', 'mews', 'gate' passage', 'trail').
We refer to that salesman as a hawker:
A person who travels about selling goods, typically advertising them by shouting:
I have always carried the word picture of a hawker swooping down to seize his customer with that shrill falcon scream, but the two hawks are homophones from different semantic roots:
hawk
(n.) c.1300, hauk, earlier havek (c.1200),
from Old English hafoc (W. Saxon), heafuc (Mercian), heafoc, from Proto-Germanic * habukaz
(cognates: Old Norse haukr, Old Saxon habuc, Middle Dutch havik, Old High German habuh, German Habicht "hawk"),
from a root meaning "to seize," from PIE *kap- "to grasp" (cognates: Russian kobec "a kind of falcon;" see capable).
hawk
(v.1) "to sell in the open, peddle," late 15c.,
back-formation from hawker "itinerant vendor" (c.1400),
from Middle Low German höken "to peddle, carry on the back, squat,"
from Proto-Germanic * huk-.
Related: Hawked; hawking. Despite the etymological connection with stooping under a burden on one's back, a hawker is technically distinguished from a peddler by use of a horse and cart or a van.
From the same peddling roots, huckster implies more aggressive than a hawker, and even a bit devious:
A person who sells in an aggressive or ruthless way.
Best Answer
One such word is thoroughfare.
[Sense 1b is marked obsolete.]
The word is most often used of paved or metalled streets, rather than paths or alleys, but the OED definition does cover those and the word could be used of them.