TURNPIKE • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Turnpike

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/tˈərnpˌaɪk/ Listen

noun

Turnpike n.

A frame consisting of two bars crossing each other at right angles and turning on a post or pin, to hinder the passage of beasts, but admitting a person to pass between the arms; a turnstile. See Turnstile, 1. "I move upon my axle like a turnpike."

A gate or bar set across a road to stop carriages, animals, and sometimes people, till toll is paid for keeping the road in repair; a tollgate.

A turnpike road.

A winding stairway. (Scot.)

(Mil.) A beam filled with spikes to obstruct passage; a cheval-de-frise. (R.)

Turnpike man, a man who collects tolls at a turnpike.

Turnpike road, a road on which turnpikes, or tollgates, are established by law, in order to collect from the users tolls to defray the cost of building, repairing, etc.

verb

Turnpike v. t. (past & past part. turnpiked; pres. part. turnpiking) To form, as a road, in the manner of a turnpike road; to throw into a rounded form, as the path of a road.

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Etymology of 'Turnpike'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Turnpike" Quotes from Famous Books

... interpose between the enemy's cavalry and Columbia; while Stanley, with two divisions of the Fourth Corps, marched from Pulaski to that place, and our cavalry moved on the enemy's right to cover the turnpike and railroad. The whole army was in position at Columbia, November 24, and began to intrench. Hood's infantry did not appear in sight until the 26th. Cox had a brush with the enemy's cavalry, which had driven in one of our cavalry brigades. That action was magnified at the time, ...

— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... air-pump, and vial of vitriolic ether, might have worked a miracle. To my Horse, again, who unhappily is still more unscientific, do not I work a miracle, and magical 'Open sesame!' every time I please to pay twopence, and open for him an impassable Schlagbaum, or shut Turnpike? ...

— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... gray percherons seemed to feel the unrest of their driver, for they fretted and actually executed a clumsy prance as Jim Irwin pulled them up at the end of the turnpike across Bronson's Slew—the said slew being a peat-marsh which annually offered the men of the Woodruff District the opportunity to hold the male equivalent of a sewing circle while working out their road taxes, with much ...

— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick

... cast of the salmon-rod. He withdrew when all this was arranged, and appeared at the time appointed, with perhaps a dozen letters sealed for the post, and a coach-parcel addressed to James Ballantyne, which he dropt at the turnpike-gate as we drove to Melrose. Seeing it picked up by a dirty urchin, and carried {p.285} into a hedge pot-house, where half-a-dozen nondescript wayfarers were smoking and tippling, I could not but wonder that it had not been the fate of some one ...

— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... Mill-House is but five miles from Winchester. By road, however, there are six miles of tolerable grey flint and rusty gravel on the Winchester and Melton turnpike, followed by three Irish miles of unaided forest track. Half of it lies under water for six months of the year; but in the summer a rutted ride projects from stony sand-pockets framed in velvet moss, ...

— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna

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