Apple belongs to the category of Fruit.
What category do street, road, and avenue belong to?
Asked
Active
Viewed 8,276 times
25
-
9The fact that RegDwight has come up with an answer in this case ("thoroughfare") does not mean that a question of this form will always have an answer. – Colin Fine May 18 '11 at 11:57
-
1Are you referring to the designations used as part of an address, or to describe the objects themselves? It seems to me that there should be a word for the part of an address that follows the street/road name (e.g., "123 Main Street") – JeffSahol May 18 '11 at 14:59
9 Answers
29
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').
-
1Though this answer may be the underdog, I'm in full agreement. To be fair, the definitions of road and thoroughfare are mutually inclusive, each using the other word as a base. While I don't think it would ever be inaccurate to say a boulevard is a type of thoroughfare, for instance, to me it seems that road lends itself more categorically useful. Wikipedia also collects types of roads. – HaL May 18 '11 at 13:46
-
But if you had a box on a form to select road/ave/st etc - what would you title it? – mgb May 18 '11 at 15:05
-
1
-
1Incidentally, the phenomenon wherein the same name is used for a class and for one of its subclasses is a type of synechdoche. – phenry May 18 '11 at 16:35
-
@Martin: If you had a box on a form to select such an item, you would undoubtedly leave some option out. (For example, how would you put in El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA, The Crescent, Berkeley, CA, or Shunpike in Millbrook, NY?) – Peter Shor May 18 '11 at 18:42
-
Yes, blank would have to be an option. The question is what the group name for "th bit at the end of a street name", what would you title the box? – mgb May 18 '11 at 18:48
-
@Martin If it helps with your labeling, the US Postal Service refers to that portion of the address as the "Street," though that doesn't make it the best label (and is US-specific). Note that many addresses with distinct geographic locations have no associated street/road; in the US this includes rural carrier routes and landmark addresses. – Matthew Frederick May 18 '11 at 19:15
-
@Martin: I think you point is that 'street' is a good answer for the OP's question, right? I'd dsay that, yes, this is good evidence, but that 'road' still has better intuitive 'feel' as the hypernym. Also, to use Lewis Carroll again, what something is, what it's name is, what you call it, what you call the name, etc, can all be different things. – Mitch May 18 '11 at 19:19
-
+1 for "road." I favor it for the listed reasons as well as for the fact that it applies in both rural and urban settings. "Thoroughfare" isn't very appropriate when indicating an unpaved country road. – Matthew Frederick May 18 '11 at 19:23
-
@Mitch - not necessarily, if I want them to enter "house number", "street name", "street type" and "street direction" in separate boxes then I need a word for "street type" - or I could just have a drop down of st/rd/ave etc and hope they figure it out. – mgb May 18 '11 at 21:30
-
@Martin: I don't think I'm disagreeing with you. All I'm saying is that the label, if a good one is found, like 'street type' may not be the best hypernym (and the hypernym may not be the best label). – Mitch May 18 '11 at 21:55
-
@Martin As Peter Shor noted, such a drop down will miss tons of valid options. Worse, it ignores very common house addressing that uses ordinal prefixes like "132 W Camelback," as used throughout the Phoenix metro area; and addressing that uses ordinal suffixes like "32nd Avenue NE," as used throughout Seattle. It also doesn't work with streetless addresses like much of Utah where addresses look like "226 N 3300 W" or places like Carmel, California, where there is no house numbering and the address involves counting houses, like "Junipero 3 SW of 10th". And that's just a bit of the US. – Matthew Frederick May 18 '11 at 21:59
-
@Matthew - and you would think a country that had such an imaginative range of addresses wouldn't try and enforce a two letter state and 5digit postcode on the rest of us when they design web forms. – mgb May 18 '11 at 22:06
-
@Martin Yeah, they had to do something to speed up mail service and get automation. I'm old enough to remember the controversy over the state abbreviations and the constant use of Zippy, their marketing character designed to convince people to use zip codes. When they added four more digits to the zip they sneakily created a unique number for most addresses. :) I agree that addresses are remarkably goofy and back when I worked with bulk mailings I learned that it takes a heck of an algorithm to validate a US address. – Matthew Frederick May 19 '11 at 00:38
-
@mgb I know this is an old q/a, but I have an answer to the question you placed in comments. I worked data entry and we called it a "designator". According to this link, the USPS calls them "Primary Street Names." – TecBrat Jun 26 '12 at 10:53
14
How about thoroughfare?
RegDwigнt
- 97,231
-
9To me, a thoroughfare is something that goes from one point to another. That is, a dead-end street or a cul-de-sac would not be a thoroughfare. I am assuming the OP wants a category that includes dead-end streets, but I could be wrong. Comparing the definitions in American dictionaries (1a: a street open at both ends from Merriam-Webster online) with those from British dictionaries (On road signs, no thoroughfare means no entry or do not go in, from Cambridge Dictionaries online), I think this differs on opposite sides of the pond. – Peter Shor May 18 '11 at 13:47
-
1@Peter Shor: In the UK, we have No Entry if you're not allowed [to drive] in. If a road doesn't actually connect back to other roads on the main network (effectively, doesn't go anywhere), the sign is No Through Way. Sometimes Cul-de-sac, but that's only used for very short roads that don't even connect to other "dead ends". – FumbleFingers Jan 15 '12 at 03:37
6
Says WordNet:
[bloom@cat-in-the-hat ~]$ wn avenue -hypen
Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun avenue
2 senses of avenue
[Skipping sense 1 because it's not the word sense we're interested in.]
Sense 2
avenue, boulevard
=> street
=> thoroughfare
=> road, route
=> way
=> artifact, artefact
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
Ken Bloom
- 297
-
This is a really good answer; my own immediate thought upon reading the question was to check what WordNet said its hypernyms were. – tchrist Jan 15 '12 at 15:50
4
If the poster is asking what to call that part of a street name, there are three terms I am familiar with:
- street (type) suffix (United States Postal Service; English Wikipedia article on street names)
- street type designation (English Wikipedia article on street names)
- generic street name (English Wikipedia article on street names)
On a form, the following terms might be used to generate the desired address given:
[house number] 732 [direction] N. [specific street name] Capitol [type] St. [quadrant] NW [secondary unit] Ste. 100 [locality] Washington [state] DC [postal code] 20401 [country] U.S.A.
In cases like The Embarcadero, there may be no street type suffix at all, only a specific street name.
In El Camino Real, the actual street type designation (camino, "road") appears in the middle of the specific street name (el ... real, "the royal ..."), but the entire street name might well be considered a stand-alone (suffix-less) specific street name for the purposes of a form.
-
Welcome to EL&U. The original question asks for a hypernym for road, street, and so on, but your answer does not seem to attempt to answer it. This is a Q&A site, not a discussion forum. I encourage you to take the site tour and visit the help center for guidance. – choster Jun 05 '14 at 15:32
2
-
-
2A way isn't supposed to be just a street, it can be anything you go through. Same goes for the other two terms. – Alenanno May 18 '11 at 11:15
1
In the specific context of mail addressing, the United States Postal Service lists about a hundred of these, and calls them 'street suffixes'.
0
I've just checked documentation supplied by the Universal Postal Union [based in Switzerland - no surprise there - but covering addresses for the whole planet], and they, like the USPS, use 'street'. E.g., the first field in their STREET file is STR_ID - 'Street identifier'.
David Garner
- 2,137