Old joke: “there are no roads in the City of London”. (The City of London is relatively small, ancient, and not the same as “London” itself). The joke is true; there’s not a single passageway there called a “road” — because by the time “road” entered English, every similar thing in the City of London had already been named.
“Road” was originally just a different spelling of “rode”, the past tense “ride.” This dates back to Old English, and at the time “road” meant you went somewhere on horseback. This idea goes back to the Germanic roots of Old English, which you can see by all the very similar words in languages with similar roots; Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Old Swedish, various “old”, “middle,” “high,” and “low” versions of German, and even Old Icelandic.
Probably because it involved horses, “road” next came to mean “raid.” The modern word “inroad,” as in “The provinces were protected by his presence from the inroads of the barbarians.” (Edward Gibbon, The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776).
“Road” meant some other things before it got around to meaning anything like a path or street. It was used as a nautical term for an area where ships were anchored. We still say a ship is “riding” at anchor, even though we no longer call a harbor a “road” or a “roadstead.”
It wasn’t until the 1600s that “road” was used to mean a path, a way, a street, a track, a treadway, a via, or an audax. That was Shakespeare’s time, and he definitely noticed the new word’s appearance — in fact that joke about the City of London comes from Shakespeare himself.
That last synonym, “audax,” sounds like a very old word but in fact just dates from about the 1930s, when it was borrowed from French. It’s the route of a bicycle race, or the race itself, in which contestants ride on a predetermined course with time limits. It’s usually quite a long route; the first one was held in 1897 from Rome to Naples, over 200 km.
Besides “audax,” there are quite a few words for roads that you only see occasionally. One interesting one is “slip.” In England a “slip” is the merging lane where you accelerate into traffic on a highway (or decelerate to exit). In the US these would probably be called “ramps.” In New England you’ll occasionally see a town side street called a “slip” — there are a couple of them in Milford, Massachusetts. Where this usage comes from is pretty obscure.
The word “slip” is amazingly versatile. It can mean the liquid slurry used in pottery, the shoot from a plant or tree used for grafting, a slope for launching boats, a way to escape someone or something, the powder ground from metal tools by a grindstone (this powder used to be collected for use in making dyes), and even the practice of cutting the handle of a spoon so it’s squared off. That last one is listed as obsolete, but for some reason in the 1500s the end of the handle of a spoon was significant: “Fourtene Spones well gilt slipped at thendes.” That’s a quote from Edward VI, but to be fair, it’s from a book about the history of English tableware compiled in 1911.
Then if you start combining “slip” with other words, things get out of hand right away, from knots (“slip-knot”) to boxes (“slip-case”), outerwear (“slip-coat”), upholstery (“slip-cover”), and about two dozen more. The game of shuffleboard even used to be called “slip-groat,” and it was prohibited at certain inns for some reason. Possibly in the 1500s it was a played more boisterously than is the case today. So depending on where you were staying at the time, there were not only no roads in the City of London — you might miss your weekly contest of slip-groat as well.
