Erm, Streets n stoof.

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Hello,

Just a little observation on the ‘What’s the difference between a street, a road, an avenue, a boulevard, etc’ question.

This is what i got from the Cambridge Dictionary, since I thought it’d be pretty good common ground.

boulevard
noun [C]
a wide road in a city, usually with trees on each side or along the centre
In the 1850s Baron Haussmann replaced the narrow streets of Paris with wide boulevards.

**lane ** (ROAD)
noun [C]
a narrow road in the countryside or in a town
It is very dangerous to drive fast along narrow country lanes.
I live at the end of church lane.

Personally, here in the UK I’ve found that usually a lane means that it’s only wide enough for one vehicle.

plaza
noun [C]
an open area or square in a town, esp. in Spanish-speaking countries, or a group of buildings including shops designed as a single development within a town

cul-de-sac
noun [C]
a short road which is blocked off at one end
We live in a cul-de-sac, so we don’t get much traffic noise.

Words like ‘road’ ‘way’ ‘drive’ and ‘pass’ seem to have too many other, (more used in modern english, perhaps?) meanings to be explained in the dictionary.

Apart from perhaps ‘way’, something tells me roads called’… Way’ are a throughfare.

street
noun [C]
a road in a city, town or village which has buildings that are usually close together along one or both sides

avenue (ROAD)
noun [C]
a wide road, with trees or tall buildings on both sides, or a wide countryside path or road with trees on both sides, esp. Br one which leads to a large house

^^^This is the one I knew already :smiley:

Tanks fer lisnin,

Pix xx

2

Streets, avenues, and boulevards belong in the town, and rarely in rural areas. Road is the most used name for rural routes, but you find roads in urban areas too. Drive connotes a scenic route, often along a park. New York state is famous for its intercity drives called “Parkways.”

Sometimes you run across names such as chase, terrace, place, or lane. These often have little to do with their original meanings, and everything to do with sounding upscale.

3

Hello, welcome to the SDMB, please provide a link when discussing Columns or Staff Reports. There are a lot of them.

What’s the difference between a street, a road, an avenue, a boulevard, etc.? : 23-Apr-1999

4

Why thankyou for the advice, Wikkit.

Hello Breathe Exhaust (top advice! I will try it straight away),

I’m in the UK.

I’d just like to add to your comments:

Streets, avenues, and boulevards belong in the town, and rarely in rural areas.

I agree, the only street I can think of locally which is located semi rurally is WATLING STREET, which is a Roman road, and which was once populated to a much greater extent than it is now. The people have gone but the name sticks.

Sometimes you run across names such as chase, terrace, place, or lane.

I agree with you on the ‘sounding upscale’ thing, but it’s not always or even most often true where I am.

Locally, we take a terrace to mean a patch of raised grass/paved area in front of/in between houses, usually where children play.

And lane, I think I described in my last post is taken to mean a thin, rural/semi rural road not wide enough for two vehicles, of course where these lanes can be widened they have been, but they’re still narrow roads by all accounts. We often use the phrase ‘drive through the lanes’ to describe the ‘back route’ to Coventry.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/newmap.srf?x=437223&y=294708&z=5&sv=437223,294708&st=4&tl=Grid+Location+437223,294708&ar=Y&mapp=newmap.srf&searchp=newsearch.srf

If you have time, take a look at the streetmap. The ‘A5’ is Watling Street. All the little red roads are ‘the lanes’.

(I live in Nuneaton, by the way.)

Pix xx

5

Yes, “Terrace” as a euphemism for “Street” is uniquely US, I think.

Unique to the UK, as far as I know, is “Close”. (“The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin” had some fun with this sort of thing.)