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route

nounverbverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɹʉwt//
  • Canada//ɹut//
  • Australia//ɹʉːt//
  • Ireland//ɹuːt//

A course or way which is traveled or passed.

noun

  1. 1

    A course or way which is traveled or passed.

    The route was used so much that it formed a rut.

    You need to find a route that you can take between these two obstacles.

    I corralled the judge, and we started off across the fields, in no very mild state of fear of that gentleman's wife, whose vigilance was seldom relaxed. And thus we came by a circuitous route to Mohair, the judge occupied by his own guilty thoughts, and I by others not less disturbing.

    It is likely that the long evolutionary trajectory of Mycoplasma went from a reductive autotroph to oxidative heterotroph to a cell-wall–defective degenerate parasite. This evolutionary trajectory assumes the simplicity to complexity route of biogenesis, a point of view that is not universally accepted.

  2. 2

    A regular itinerary of stops, or the path followed between these stops, such as for delivery or passenger transportation.

    We live near the bus route.

    Here is a map of our delivery routes.

    The Route 4 bus will arrive on 5th St. at Robinson Ave at 3:30.

  3. 3

    A road or path; often specifically a highway.

    Follow Route 49 out of town.

  4. 4

    figurativeOne of multiple methods or approaches to doing something.

    If such an option is to viable over time, it needs to be protected against competitors. Having patent protection is one route. […] Another route is to have a programmatic investment strategy […]. Rolex has taken this route […]

  5. 5

    historicalOne of the major provinces of imperial China from the Later Jin to the Song, corresponding to the Tang and early Yuan circuits.

    Under the director were eight education promotion officials (quanxue yuan), each installed in a “route”(lu,corresponding to the policing ward).

    In the year Zhiyuan 8, 5th month, on xinwei day (around June, 1271), owing to the fact that the chieftains of the eight polities in Dali had submitted recently and were adhered to [China], the thirty-seven tribal regions under Dali were divided into three routes.

  6. 6

    A specific entry in a router that tells the router how to transmit the data it receives.

  7. 7

    A race longer than one mile.

  8. 8

    A path that has been secured by a railway signalling system for the passage of a train and locked to prevent any conflicting train movements from taking place.

Etymology

From Middle English route, from Old French route, from Latin rupta [via] (literally “a path made by force”). Compare Modern French route. See routine. Further via Latin ruptus related with bankrupt.

verb

  1. 1

    To direct or divert along a particular course.

    All incoming mail was routed through a single office.

  2. 2

    to connect two local area networks, thereby forming an internet.

  3. 3

    To send (information) through a router.

    Google Glass has come under fire from privacy advocates because it can record video without subjects being aware of it, and that any video will be routed through Google's servers.

verb

  1. 1

    Variant of rootEye dialect spelling of root.

Forms

plural
routes
past tense
routed
past participle
routed
present participle
routeing, routing
third person singular
routes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).