Road, Rode, Rowed

Road, rode and rowed are homophones: have same sounds but different spellings and meanings.

Road is a path, a paved path, a path paved with tarmac or tar.

Road is the way of passage for vehicles and living beings (domesticated animals); and there are private roads, too.
‘Road’ is one of the commonly used words in English language, and has also entered into the lexicons of many other languages, literally – road!

The USA has some of the best road networks among all the countries in the world such as its Interstate 80 (I-80), I-90, US Route 6, and Route 20.

China’s Tongsan Expressway is its longest highway running over 5,700 km traversing through the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong and the 6th longest highways in the world.

India has one of the top ten longest highway networks in the world: the Golden Quadrilateral Highway Network connects the four different cities (Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai) in the four cardinal points spanning over 5,846 km maintained by National Highways Authority of India (NHAI).

The Trans-Siberian Highway in Russia is the third longest highway (11,000 km), second is Australia’s Highway 1 (14,500 km), and the world’s longest highway is the Pan American Highway (connecting the North American, Central American and South American countries) running over 48,000 km.

Road also forms many compound words: road accident, road agent, road apple (horse manure), road burn, road movie (film), road grit, road map, road hog (people obstructing on others on the roads), road case (suitcases used by musicians and music industry), road agent (highwayman, hijacker); roadshow, roadside, roadside thistle, roadworthiness Rode has two distinct meanings.

Rode is the past tense of ‘to ride’. Ride functions as a verb (are you riding or walking to the stadium?) and noun (the ride on the bicycle was pleasant because the road traversed through suburban area, jungle and the forest).

The verbs of ride are: ride-rode-ridden.

Rode as a noun, nautically, indicates to the line, cable, chain, rope attached to the anchor of a small boat. The plural form of rode is rodes: rodes are used to connect the boat or the vessel to its anchor.

Rode is the trade name of a company that manufactures microphones.

Rowed functions as the past tense of the verb (row-rowed-rowed) and as an adjective (having rows: a house located in a rowed habitations).

Rows (plural form of the noun ‘row’ meaning fight, fisticuffs) are not uncommon when people lose temper either on the roadside or in stadiums or at pubs.

By: Kovuuri G Reddy