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Glite Dictionary
Chisholm Trail

Chisholm Trail

1 9.3
An old route in the United States where cowboys drove cattle from Texas to Kansas in the late 1800s
  • noun
  • /ˈtʃɪzəm ˌtreɪl/
translation icon : Sendero Chisholm
  • Driving cattle on the Chisholm Trail was a challenging task filled with dust and long days.
  • Chisholm Trail for cattle drives

Examples

  • DRIVEN ALL THE WAY UP FROM THE CHISHOLM TRAIL, GET ON!

    Hannah's Law (2012)

  • Even more than Lomax, who was a Texan and grew up (as he liked to point out) beside a branch of the Chisholm Trail, Thorp was an unlikely advocate for the music of the Wild West.

    Academic text (2005)

  • In the late 19th century, many cowboys drove cattle along the Chisholm Trail to reach the railroad.

  • The Chisholm Trail became a crucial route for transporting cattle from Texas to Kansas.

Surface Forms

Chisholm Trail singular
Chisholm Trails plural

Morphology

Chisholm + trail

Knowing 'trail' a B1 learner would infer this is a path or route associated with 'Chisholm' (a name), so part of the meaning is recoverable. However 'Chisholm' is a proper noun that gives no information about the historical role as a 19th‑century cattle-driving route to railheads, so the full, culturally specific meaning cannot be derived from the constituents alone.

Etymology

Chisholm Trail gets its name from a trader called Chisholm whose old path through Texas and Kansas became the route cowboys used. Cowboys drove cattle along that trail to the 'railheads' where trains took the animals away, so the name came to mean the famous cattle route of the late 1800s.