TeachingEnglish
Street or avenue
Submitted by T-chair on 28 October, 2009 - 22:28
Some words seem so commonplace that we take it as granted but sometimes when asked about their differences we need to talk to a native speaker as a refrence because dictionaries in theses cases are silent or are of no help, for example the difference between a street and an avenue. Would a native speaker be kind enough comment on it. Thank you
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Street, avenue, road, lane, with other variations working in other contexts, are often close synonyms. They will be used pretty much interchangeably.
To my ear, street is perhaps the more neutral, but I've just opened the street map of my hometown, and see: Salcombe Avenue, Sefton Street, Rutherford Place, Rossall Close, Rossall Gate, Rossall Promenade, Rodwell Walk, Stocks Court, States Road, Southfield Drive and Thorn Grove. Streets named 'promenade' are next to the sea, and streets named 'avenue' will normally have trees on them, though this may not hold good in the US.
I'm afraid I'm not really sure.
I grew up thinking that Avenue was the same as Court. A dead end with a big circular area so cars could turn around. Years later, though, I discovered that there are more street-ike avenues than court-like ones.
Nowadays, being a bit cynical, I think all those terms other than street except for a few very specific ones (like Court) are just fancy names used to try to give a street a better image, and to therefore increase the price of the housing and land there. Any traditional meaning seems to have been lost in the modern market-oriented world.
That said, I get the impression that a lot of these words have different meanings for different people (and not just US vs UK, but even two people in the same family might interpret them differently).
Streets or roads are a general term and are used widely and at random. However, we live on 22 Black Street, 22 Green Road, 22 Orange Lane, 22 Brown Avenue. So it can be called an avenue because it is an avenue by name.
We would describe a tree-lined road as an avenue, possibly, if it also had houses on either side.
The Main Street in a town is the central road in a town.
A main road is any big road leading from one town to another.