Route

Route (pronounce rout or root)

(1) A course, way, or road for passage or travel; the choice of roads or a path taken to reach a destination,

(2) A customary or regular line of passage or travel, sometimes formally so-named.

(3) A specific itinerary, round, or number of stops regularly visited by a person in the performance of their work or duty (bus route, paper route, mountaineering route etc).

(4) To set the path of something or someone.

(5) To send or forward by a particular course or road.

(6) In clinical medicine, the means by which a drug or agent is administered or enters the body (the oral, surface or injectionoral route).

(7) Figuratively, one of multiple methods or approaches to doing something.

(8) In Sino-historiography, one of the major provinces of imperial China from the Later Jin to the Song, corresponding to the Tang and early Yuan circuits.

(9) In computing (networking), an entry in a router table instructing a router how to relay the data packets received (and as a transitive verb, to send information through a router).

(10) In computing, to connect two local area networks, thereby forming an internet (now a rare expression though the practice remains common).

(11) In horse racing, a race longer than one mile (1600m) (now rare).

1175–1225: From the Middle English route (a way, a road, space for passage), from the Middle French route, from the Anglo-Norman rute (troop, band) from the Old French rute (road, way, path), from the Vulgar Latin rupta (literally “via a broken established way” (a road opened by force or cut through a forest etc)), the feminine past participle of rumpere (to break; to burst).  Route is a noun, router is a noun & verb and routed & routing are verbs; the noun plural is routes.

The famous US Route 66.

The verb dates from the 1880s and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the first citation as an 1881 guide for stationmasters on the London & North Western Railway which included the phrase “mark for use on a certain route”.  In the development of the noun, the sense of a “regular course for carrying passengers or freight (first used in the postal system) emerged in the late eighteenth century, and was an extension of the fifteenth century "customary path for the driving of animal stock and herds; something later applied to sales, collections, delivery of newspapers, bread etc and the pronunciation rout was apparently universal since the early nineteenth century.  The meaning “direct an electrical signal, phone call etc over a particular defined circuit or to a particular location" has existed since 1948 and is now most familiar in computer networking.  Computer networking engineers also picked-up “re-route” (direct packets of data to another route), a direct borrowing from the postal system where a “re-route” was an instruction physically to re-direct mail from one address to another.  The word “routine” was related to route (presumably from the notion of something like a postman’s route which was unchanged from year to year) as was “rut” which originally described the track in (an unpaved) road left by a wheel and etymologists speculate this may have begun as a variant of route.  The figurative sense of rut (a dull, unchanging and habitual course or life) emerged in the mid nineteenth century based on the idea that once the wheel of a cart become “stuck in a rut”, it’s difficult (and demands much energy) to change direction (ie to “get out of the rut”).

An unfortunate choice of route: In 2012, Lindsay Lohan, travelling on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica, California, was involved in a crash between her (rented) Porsche 911 (997) Carrera S and an eighteen wheeler truck.  As one would suspect in such an unequal contest, the Porsche was badly damaged.

In postal systems, railways, computing and other fields in which objects (real or weightless) must be moved, specialized forms have been created as needed including misroute, misrouting, misrouted, preroute, prerouted, prerouting, reroute, rerouted & rerouting (hyphenated forms also used) although deroute seems never to have been needed.  The alternative spellings misrouteing, rerooted etc also existed.  Route was one of many words used to describe some sort or road including avenue, course, direction, itinerary, journey, line, passage, road, track, trail, way, transmit, beat, beeline, byway, circuit, detour, digression, divergence & meandering although routes tend to be longer and made of many roads joined together.  In idiomatic use, “to go the route” is to see something difficult or challenging through to completion.

Funded by the Lockwood Charitable Foundation, London's Red Route Café (24 Lower Clapton Road E5) is located at the Community Service Volunteers (CSV) Springboard Hackney learning centre.  In 2012, while in London for a theatrical engagement, Lindsay Lohan added her support, tweeting "Volunteer and be of service.  Come help us at #RedRouteCafé".  Apparently, while in the city, Ms Lohan helped in promotional activities for the Red Route Café, contributing to a community radio show and planning events.

It’s a simple, five letter, one syllable word but around the world it supports two distinct pronunciations (rout & rout), both of which for centuries co-existed in British English but during the 1800s, rout faded and then vanished (Scotland the last hold-out and interestingly in the cities rather than the highlands) from the British Isles.  In North American it persisted and to this day, as both noun and verb, both can be heard.  One definite exception to the general pattern of use is the pronunciation of the noun router ((1) one who arranges or schedules routes or (2) in computer networking, a device (hardware or software) that forwards data packets between computer networks).  Many languages simply adopted the name and usual pronunciation from US use and in most of the world it’s thus root-ha or rou-ter.  However, in Australia & New Zealand, the word “root” evolved also a slang term for sexual intercourse which of course begat rooter in that sense so the pronunciations root-ha or rou-ter became exclusive to that use (and there’s some evidence the slang has somewhat spread in the south Pacific islands).  In those markets, the computer routers are pronounced rout-ah, something which sometimes initially baffles visiting engineers.

Rooted: The Evil Dead (1981).

The most illustrative example of the slang term root (Australia & New Zealand) in action is the famous tree root scene from the horror movie The Evil Dead (1981).  After that, the producers had nowhere to go and the sequels were increasingly comedic and such is the cult following of the original that interest remains and Evil Dead Rise is scheduled for release in April 2023.

Huawei AR3260-100E-AC Series Enterprise Router.

Said to have been prompted by fears the equipment might be configured in such a way that it enabled spying by the Chinese government (ie the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)), a number of nations have either banned or restricted use of Chinese-made Huawei routers and other telecommunications equipment.  The countries imposing a complete or partial ban of the Huawei equipment in big-machine infrastructure included the "five eyes" countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia & New Zealand) and Japan.  Thus far, a number of EU nations (including Spain, France & Germany) have not issued an outright ban but have imposed restrictions and tightened security measures in networks in which they're installed.  This is either because they believe still that a robust security model can be mapped onto the concept of a "core & edges" model of network infrastructure or they've accepted Huawei's (TikTok-like) assurance they would decline any request from the CCP to provide information.  In Beijing, the Spanish, French and German files may already have been moved to the "Useful Idiots" filing cabinet.