slip road
- noun
- /slɪp roʊd/
- UK
:
vía de acceso
- He chases down a slip road as the taxi rounds the corner behind us.
Examples
-
These steps include being granted controlled access to the slip road in front of the university—always, he said, "a top priority for me so that we could monitor and control the vehicular traffic adjacent to the university"—and the switch to using armored vehicles and armed guards to transport staff and faculty.
Academic text (2016) -
From where he sat, Sam imagined that he could feel the grip of the driver's fat fingers on the wide steering wheel as the heavy-set man maneuvered his huge bus out of Jerusalem's Central Station and onto the slip road heading south.
Fiction book (1997) -
John's car pulled off a B road into a slip road into a garage.
Fiction book (2001) -
They bucketed past the slip road for the M8 and central Glasgow.
Fiction book (1998) -
The driver carefully merged onto the slip road to join the busy motorway.
-
They took the slip road off the highway to reach their exit safely.
-
After missing the main exit, he maneuvered onto the slip road to turn around.
Synonyms
11
2.4
A smaller road that goes off a main road
9
2.9
A short road that leads to a main road like a highway
7
1.7
A small road that turns off a main road
How Big
Surface Forms
Morphology
The verb 'slip' (to move or slide) combined with 'road' gives a loose metaphorical cue that this is a road used to move off or onto a main road, but it does not explicitly specify the technical function of a joining/leaving ramp. Because the traffic-specific meaning and regional usage (UK) are somewhat specialized, learners who only know the literal words may infer a vague idea but not the precise purpose, so the item is only partially predictable.
Etymology
The compound slip road comes from the image of a short ramp where cars can slip on or off the main road, like slipping in and out quickly. So a slip road means a short road used to 'join or leave' a major road such as a motorway.