Turnpike

Quick meaning: Turnpike is a noun meaning A gate or bar set across a road to stop carriages, animals, and sometimes people, until a toll is paid.

Meaning

A gate or bar set across a road to stop carriages, animals, and sometimes people, until a toll is paid.

More Meanings

1. (Scotland) A winding stairway.
2. (military) A beam filled with spikes to obstruct passage; a cheval de frise.
3. To form (a road, etc.) in the manner of a turnpike road, or into a rounded form, as the path of a road.
4. A frame consisting of two bars crossing each other at right angles and turning on a post or pin, to hinder the passage of animals, but admitting a person to pass between the arms.
5. (mathematical economics) A trajectory on a finite time interval that satisfies an optimality criterion which is associated with a cost function.
6. (chiefly US) A toll road, especially a toll expressway. In some places the clipped version, pike, is used for roads without tolls.

Example Sentences

[T]here is a bundle of pawnbrokers' duplicates, those turnpike tickets on the road of poverty .

In the monograph we discuss a number of results concerning turnpike properties in the calculus of variations and optimal control which were obtained by the author in the last ten years.

Eleven Pair of Mills ſtand within Four Miles of the Place, which bring a great Trade to it: But the Road is by this means ſo continually torn, that it is one of the worſt Turnpikes about London.

[…] Pope Pelagius, then Bishop of Rome […] thereupon assum'd the Power of opening and shutting Heaven's Gates; and he afterwards setting a Price or Toll upon the Entrance, as we do here at passing a Turn-pike […]

Word Forms

• turnpikes
• turnpiking
• turnpiked

Synonyms for turnpike

Depending on context, synonyms include turnstile, tollgate, tollbar, pike.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include roads, turn-stile, tollway, passimeter, toll-bar, stile.

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