wide spot in the road
1
6.8
- noun
- I generally like my riffing paired with riffable material, and the movie gets off to a horrible start when it spends the first quarter of its running time lingering by a wide spot in the road.
Examples
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During our road trip, we stopped at a wide spot in the road to enjoy the beautiful scenery.
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But Dad, this is just a wide spot in the road.
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The woman steered her car onto the first wide spot in the road.
Fiction book (1994) -
We found a comfortable wide spot in the road where we could safely pull over and take a break.
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The bus driver skillfully maneuvered the large vehicle into a wide spot in the road to allow passengers to disembark.
Synonyms
2
4.1
A widened part of a road where cars can stop or let others pass
1
3.8
A place at the side of a road where cars can stop briefly
1
3.8
A paved area beside a main road where cars can stop briefly
1
2.8
A wider part of a road where cars can stop or park
Antonyms
How Wide
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly composed from the parts: 'wide' (broad) + 'spot' (location) + 'in the road' denotes a location on the road that is wider than usual, so a learner who knows the constituent words can infer it. This is a literal spatial description following normal English noun-phrase composition and is cross-linguistically predictable rather than idiomatic.
Etymology
Wide spot in the road comes from the simple picture of a road that becomes wider for a short time. That extra space, a wide spot, lets cars stop safely, so the phrase means 'a place to stop or pull over'.