Word.ws English Dictionary

Sand Hill Road

Sand Hill Road proper noun: an arterial road in western Silicon Valley, California, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital firms' offices.

Proper noun

Sand Hill Road

  1. An arterial road in western Silicon Valley, California, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital firms' offices.
    • Holonym: Silicon Valley
    Synonyms:
    Sand Hill, SHR
  2. A neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, named after the road.
    • Holonym: Silicon Valley
    • There was a time when funding for internet start-ups was so easy that what came to matter was not how much you could get but where it came from. And if you got it from Sand Hill Road, Wall Street regarded that much as Catholics regard a benediction from the Pope.2001 August 25, John Naughton, “There is a message in the dust on Sand Hill Road”, in The Observer
    Synonyms:
    Sand Hill, SHR
  3. (metonymically) The Californian venture capital industry, including its influence on Big Tech and biotech.
    • Near-synonym: Silicon Valley
    • Bryce Roberts said, “It has to be a way of disrupting Sand Hill Road”—where a number of the Valley’s top venture firms reside.2016 October 3, Tad Friend, quoting Bryce Roberts, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny”, in The New Yorker

Synonyms of Sand Hill Road

Origin of Sand Hill Road

The road and its name existed in the 1920s and possibly before. The road was evidently named as a route toward a place called Sand Hill, but the Sand Hill in Oakley is not the referent, as it lies in a distant part of the Bay Area. The neighborhood sense and the venture-capital industry sense are by metonymy and are many decades newer.

Questions about Sand Hill Road

What does Sand Hill Road mean?
Sand Hill Road means an arterial road in western Silicon Valley, California, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital firms' offices.
What part of speech is Sand Hill Road?
Sand Hill Road is a proper noun.

Words near Sand Hill Road in the dictionary

  1. sand grape
  2. sand grapes
  3. sand grouse
  4. sand grouses
  5. Sand Hill
  6. Sand Hill Road
  7. sand hog
  8. sand hogs
  9. sand hopper
  10. sand hoppers
  11. sand hornet

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Sand Hill Road (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Sand Hill Road.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sand_hill_road. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.