Word.ws English Dictionary

by-way

by-way is the alternative spelling of byway.

Meaning of byway

Noun

byway (plural byways)

  1. A road or track not following a main route; a secondary or minor road or path.
    • Near-synonyms: back road, back street, back lane
  2. A road that is not frequently travelled.
  3. (broadly) a little-known or arcane field of study or detail.
    • Though his account of written communication over the past 5,000 years necessarily has a powerful forward momentum, his diversions down the fascinating byways of the subject are irresistible ...2013 September 14, Jane Shilling, “The Golden Thread: the Story of Writing, by Ewan Clayton, review [print edition: Illuminating language]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review), page R29

Forms of by-way

pluralby-ways

Questions about by-way

What is by-way the alternative spelling of?
By-way is the alternative spelling of byway.

Words near by-way in the dictionary

  1. by-turnings
  2. by-view
  3. by-views
  4. by-wash
  5. by-washes
  6. by-way
  7. by-ways
  8. by-works
  9. by-your-leave
  10. by-your-leaves
  11. bya

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: by-way (page history and authors); byway (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “by-way.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/by-way. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.