Road++and+Stead


 * Road and Stead **

The history of "road" is closely linked to that of both "ride" and "raid". It is actually from the past tense of the Old English verb "to ride", which we retain in a different spelling.

In Old English "road" meant a journey on horseback.

A little later it came to mean riding with hostile intent, hence the "raid" sense,

"raid" being an old Scots form of "road".

By about 1300 "road" could also refer to a ship riding on the waves and out of this came the harbour sense of "road", a partly sheltered stretch of water near the shore in which ships could ride at anchor, as in "roadstead", in which the second part is the obsolete "**Stead"** for a place.

Our sense of a road as being a fixed route or line on land for getting from one place to another came along much later, at the very end of the sixteenth century (Shakespeare is the first known user).

This explains the old joke that there are no roads in the City of London (The Medieval core of the Metropolis), as indeed there are not.


 * All the ways there had been named before the word came into the language.**