down the road
- idiom
- Should managers be thinking further down the road regarding their information system needs?
- years down the road
- further down the road
- think down the road
And I'll give you some examples down the road.
- And I'll give you some examples down the road.
- And it might be that some of my views lead down the road to some sort of catastrophe.
- They might find this good news out about me or down the road, but it won't be from me.
- And so that's maybe something we can imagine down the road.
- You're actually liking a different kind of sentence five years down the road than you were four years ago.
- Many people will talk about nightmares and dissociated moments years down the road after these relationships.
- It's it's in between being sued down the line, down the road by students they mistreated.
Examples
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But conservation is all about looking down the road and planning for the future.
Academic text (1999) -
It just leads to trouble down the road, OK?
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Because it's going to be a lot more valuable a little ways down the road in this respect.
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I mean, maybe a door opens up down the road, but for now, we're just friends.
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We are leaving our resort and walking down the road to find some coffee.
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Hospitals need to be thinking many years down the road when they first build a website.
Academic text (1997) -
The skills developed in the music classroom may take young children far down the road to becoming better readers.
Academic text (2012) -
To be fair, the economics profession has helped to direct politicians down the road toward multiple objectives.
Academic text (1993) -
We might not see results immediately, but I believe we will find success down the road.
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He plans to invest more in his education, knowing it will pay off down the road.
Synonyms
At some time in the future
At some time in the future
At some time in the future
At a time after now or after a time already said
At some point in the future
It happens soon
After a while
At a later time
At a time after now or after a time already said
From this time on into the future
Antonyms
How Soon
Surface Forms
Morphology
down + the + road
The temporal sense 'in the future' is a metaphorical extension of the spatial image 'further along a road' — combining 'down' (further along) with 'road' (a path) yields the idea of a later point. This mapping from space to time is common across languages, so learners who know the words may guess the meaning, but it relies on a metaphorical transfer rather than strict compositionality.
Etymology
Down the road comes from the simple image of moving down a road: things you meet further along the road happen later, not now. So it means 'in the future' or 'eventually'.