Avenue

[Audiendus]

avenue

From Latin via French. Originally 'approach' or 'way of approach', then 'approach road to a country house', then 'wide road lined with trees', then any wide street, then used randomly for the names of residential streets.

Still used to mean 'approach' in a non-physical sense, e.g. 'avenue of investigation'.

[David Myer]

Nice one, Audiendus. Very interesting.

Curiously I spent the first seven years of my life in a street called Railway Approach (in Twickenham). I didn't know it was really an Avenue. Don't you hate those ridiculous computer programs that ask for the street name and want the word 'street' or whatever in the next field and they offer all the alternatives the silly programmer could think of? Usually there are more than a hundred of them (if you live in a Way, you have to scroll through 95 of them), and Approach is invariably not on the list. Of course it is always a "mandatory field" (another pet hate) and "other" is not an option.

I imagine that the standard pet hate of computer programmers is pedants like me.

[Audiendus]

'Avenue Road' (something of a tautology) and 'The Avenue' are very common street names.

Don't you hate those ridiculous computer programs that ask for the street name and want the word 'street' or whatever in the next field and they offer all the alternatives the silly programmer could think of? Usually there are more than a hundred of them (if you live in a Way, you have to scroll through 95 of them), and Approach is invariably not on the list.

This is especially problematic for street names of the form 'The ...', and single-word names (we have 'Sandilands', 'Sandhills' and 'Upfield' locally).

[Slava]

Taken up and treated here.