meaning of english word journey

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Pronunciation of 'journey'.

Definitions of 'journey'

English usage, conjugations of 'journey', synonyms of 'journey', collocations with 'journey', examples of 'journey'  in a sentence, translations of 'journey', 'journey' in other languages.

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journey noun

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What does the noun journey mean?

There are 24 meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun journey , 13 of which are labelled obsolete. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.

journey has developed meanings and uses in subjects including

Entry status

OED is undergoing a continuous programme of revision to modernize and improve definitions. This entry has not yet been fully revised.

How common is the noun journey ?

How is the noun journey pronounced, british english, u.s. english, where does the noun journey come from.

Earliest known use

Middle English

The earliest known use of the noun journey is in the Middle English period (1150—1500).

journey is a borrowing from French.

Etymons: French jornee , journee .

Nearby entries

• journalism, n. 1833–
• journalist, n. 1693–
• journalistic, adj. & n. 1829–
• journalistically, adv. 1870–
• journalizable, adj. 1858–
• journalize, v. 1766–
• journalizer, n. 1837–
• journal-letter, n. 1756–
• journally, adv. 1554–92
• journ-chopper, n. 1883–
• journey, n. ?c1225–
• journey, v. c1330–
• journey-bated, adj. 1598
• journey-book, n. 1610–
• journey cake, n. 1754–
• journeyed, adj. 1553–
• journeyer, n. 1566–
• journeying, n. c1330–
• journeyman, n. 1463–
• journey-money, n. 1883–
• journey-pride, n. 1938–

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Meaning & use

Pronunciation, compounds & derived words, entry history for journey, n..

journey, n. was first published in 1901; not yet revised.

journey, n. was last modified in December 2023.

Revision of the OED is a long-term project. Entries in oed.com which have not been revised may include:

• corrections and revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates;
• new senses, phrases, and quotations which have been added in subsequent print and online updates.

Revisions and additions of this kind were last incorporated into journey, n. in December 2023.

Earlier versions of this entry were published in:

OED First Edition (1901)

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OED Second Edition (1989)

• View journey, n. in OED Second Edition

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Citation details

Factsheet for journey, n., browse entry.

Synonyms of journey

• as in to travel
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Thesaurus Definition of journey

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Synonyms & Similar Words

• peregrination
• commutation

Thesaurus Definition of journey  (Entry 2 of 2)

• peregrinate
• road - trip
• knock (about)
• perambulate

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Thesaurus Entries Near journey

Cite this entry.

“Journey.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/journey. Accessed 20 May. 2024.

More from Merriam-Webster on journey

Nglish: Translation of journey for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of journey for Arabic Speakers

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noun as in travel from one place to another

Strongest matches

• exploration

Strong matches

• constitutional
• peregrination
• transmigration
• vagabondage

verb as in travel

• peregrinate

Weak matches

• knock about
• take a trip

Discover More

Example sentences.

If either is selected, it would not launch until 2026 at the earliest, and would take at least a few months to make the journey.

The job is a cherry on top, but the journey and the experience of being able to audition and leave your heart in the room and feel good about it, no matter what happens, that’s rare and that was amazing.

Cross-device measurement helps connect the dots of your customer’s journey and ensures you know how effective your campaigns are at driving user behavior.

You are somewhat of a new grandmother and you’ve been enjoying that journey.

Instead of having numerous articles addressing each of these particular questions, brands and publishers could consolidate this information as it is all pertinent to the same stage of the journey that the user is in.

The brokers then scout out potential “crew members” who can earn substantial discounts for working the journey.

The next day, after driving to Putney on the outskirts of London, we start the end of our journey.

The NYPD Emerald Society pipes and drums struck up a slow march and the procession began the journey to the cemetery.

We began a journey with Koenig in the first episode of Serial.

But the sunlight is threatening to fade and a three-and-a-half-hour river journey back to Kisangani looms.

With a hammer the boy knocked off some of the slats of the small box in which Squinty had made his journey.

Then summoning a smart young jemadar with whom he had talked a good deal during the journey, he asked him to read the chit.

But dismissing them from our thoughts for the time being, as we did then from our presence, let us continue our journey.

If the journey is now distasteful to her, she has but her own rashness to blame in having sought it herself.

It was past sundown when they left San Bernardino, but a full moon made the night as good as day for their journey.

Related Words

Words related to journey are not direct synonyms, but are associated with the word journey . Browse related words to learn more about word associations.

noun as in existence

• subsistence

noun as in revolution, track, boundary

• bound/bounds
• circulation
• circumference
• circumnavigation
• circumscription
• circumvolution
• perambulation

verb as in sail

• keep steady pace
• push off/push on
• wander about

noun as in sailing expedition

verb as in travel, visit

• pass through

Viewing 5 / 72 related words

On this page you'll find 148 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to journey, such as: adventure, campaign, course, crossing, drive, and expedition.

From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.

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Definition of journey verb from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

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Find out which words work together and produce more natural-sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app. Try it for free as part of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary app.

journey (n.)

c. 1200, "a defined course of traveling; one's path in life," from Old French journée "a day's length; day's work or travel" (12c.), from Vulgar Latin * diurnum "day," noun use of neuter of Latin diurnus "of one day" (from dies "day," from PIE root *dyeu- "to shine"). The French fem, suffix -ée , from Latin -ata , was joined to nouns in French to make nouns expressing the quantity contained in the original noun, and thus also relations of times ( soirée , matinée , année ) or objects produced.

Meaning "act of traveling by land or sea" is c. 1300. In Middle English it also meant "a day" (c. 1400); a day's work (mid-14c.); "distance traveled in one day" (mid-13c.), and as recently as Johnson (1755) the primary sense was still "the travel of a day." From the Vulgar Latin word also come Spanish jornada , Italian giornata .

journey (v.)

mid-14c., "travel from one place to another," from Anglo-French journeyer , Old French journoiier "work by day; go, walk, travel," from journée "a day's work or travel" (see journey (n.)). Related: Journeyed ; journeying .

Entries linking to journey

1570s, French, literally "good day," from bon "good," from Latin bonus "good" (see bonus ) + jour "day" (see journey (n.)).

from French plat du jour "dish of the day," which appeared from early 20c. on restaurant menus; abstracted as an all-purpose modifier by 1989. For jour "day" see journey (n.).

• See all related words ( 5 ) >

Trends of journey

More to explore, share journey.

updated on October 13, 2021

Trending words

• 1 . pentecost
• 3 . sandwich
• 4 . hamburger
• 5 . breakfast
• 6 . marriage
• 9 . america
• 10 . disciple

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When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?

Changing our hair, getting divorced, taking spa vacations — they’re not just things we do; they’re “journeys.” The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all.

By Lisa Miller

Drew Barrymore has been talking with Gayle King about her perimenopause “journey ,” and the soccer phenom Carli Lloyd has just divulged her fertility “journey .” By sharing her breast cancer story, Olivia Munn has said she hopes she will “help others find comfort, inspiration, and support on their own journey.” A recent interview with Anne Hathaway has been posted on Instagram with a headline highlighting her “ sobriety journey ,” and Kelly Clarkson has opened up about what Women’s Health calls her “ weight loss journey .” On TikTok, a zillion influencer-guides lead pilgrims on journeys through such ephemeral realms as faith, healing, grief, friendship, mastectomy, and therapy — often selling courses, supplements or eating plans as if they were talismans to help safeguard their path.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

“Journey” has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail, and expressing — in the broadest possible way — an individual’s experience of travails over time.

It’s often related to physical or mental health, but it can really be about anything: “Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery,” said Beth Patton, who lives in Central Indiana and has relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, she said, “journey” is a debated word. “It’s a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like, ‘Oh, this is something special and magical.’” Not everyone appreciates this, she said.

According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online. Mining a new database of conversational American English he and colleagues are building, Egbert could show exactly how colloquial “journey” has become: One woman in Pennsylvania described her “journey to become a morning person,” while another, in Massachusetts, said she was “on a journey of trying to like fish.”

Egbert was able to further demonstrate how the word itself has undergone a transformative journey — what linguists call “semantic drift.” It wasn’t so long ago that Americans mostly used “journey” to mean a literal trip, whereas now it’s more popular as a metaphor. Egbert demonstrated this by searching the more than one billion words in a database called COCA for the nouns people put before “journey” to clarify what sort they’re on. Between 1990 and 2005, the most common modifier was “return,” followed by words like “ocean,” “train,” “mile,” “night,” “overland,” and “bus.”

But between 2006 and 2019, usage shifted. “Return” remains the most common noun modifier to journey, but now it’s followed closely by “faith,” “cancer,” and “life.” Among the top 25 nouns used to modify “journey” today are: “soul,” “adoption,” and “hair.”

In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” said Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University who specializes in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still (standardized tests! working from home!), ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress. This is why we say, “‘I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get there,’” Semino explained. “Or ‘I’m at a crossroads.’”

So it’s not surprising, perhaps, that as Americans started seeing good health as a desirable goal, achievable through their own actions and choices — and marketers encouraged these pursuits and commodified them — the words “journey” and “health” became inextricably linked. In 1898, C.W. Post wrote a pamphlet he called “The Road to Wellville,” which he attached to each box of his new product, Grape-Nuts. In 1926, the Postum Cereal Company republished the pamphlet as a small book , now with the subtitle, “A Personally Conducted Journey to the Land of Good Health by the Route of Right Living.”

The language (and business) of self-help so completely saturates culture, “it gets kind of hard to trace where a word started and where it came from,” said Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of “Promise Land: My Journey Through America’s Self-Help Culture.” Americans like to put an optimistic, brave spin on suffering, and “journey” seeped in because, Lamb-Shapiro speculated, it’s bland enough to “tackle really difficult things,” yet positive enough to “make them palatable and tolerable.”

“Journey” had fully entered medical speak by the 2010s. Many cancer patients recoiled from the “battle” language traditionally used by doctors, as well as by friends and relatives. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag had noted back in 1978 that “every physician and every attentive patient is familiar with, if perhaps inured to, this military terminology.” But now, opposition to the notion of disease as an enemy combatant reached a crescendo. To reflexively call an experience of cancer a battle created “winners” and “losers,” where death or long suffering represented a failure — of will, strength, determination, diet, behavior, or outlook — on the part of the patient.

Many patients “detest” the military metaphor, Robert Miller conceded in Oncology Times in 2010. Knowing this, Miller, then a breast cancer oncologist affiliated with Johns Hopkins, said he struggled to find the right words in composing a condolence note to a patient’s spouse. “I welcome suggestions,” he wrote.

“Journey” seemed less judgmental, more neutral. In Britain, the National Health Service had started to almost exclusively use “journey” language in reference to cancer (treatments were “pathways”). Semino, the metaphor expert whose father had died of cancer at a time when patients’ diagnoses were hidden from them, wanted to examine how patients talked about it — and whether that language caused them harm. In a research paper Semino published with colleagues in 2015, she looked at how patients talked about their cancer on forums online and found that they still used “battle” as often as they did “journey,” and that “journey” could be disempowering, as well.

For some people, talking about cancer as a “journey” gave them a sense of control and camaraderie — buddies traveling the same path — but others used the term to convey their exhaustion. Having cancer “is like trying to drive a coach and horses uphill with no back wheels on the coach,” one man wrote. Patients used “journey” to describe just how passive they felt or how reluctant to bear the burden of their disease. Separately, patients have told Semino how much they hate the word “journey,” saying it trivializes their experience, that it’s clichéd.

But it was too late: The metaphor already was everywhere. In 2014, Anna Wintour was asked which word she would like to banish from the fashion lexicon and she said, “journey.” The following year, Yolanda Foster, the mother of Gigi and Bella Hadid, told People magazine that while she was on her Lyme disease journey, two of her children were afflicted, too. Medical journals and government publications began describing insomnia , the effort to achieve health-care reform , diabetes , and the development of RSV vaccines as a journey. The term “healing journey,” in use since at least the mid-2010s, blew up around 2021. The phrase in news media referenced the experience of cancer , celebrity weight loss , trafficking of Indigenous children , Sean Combs’s creative process , spa vacations , amputation , and better sex .

On the Reddit channel Chronic Illness, one poster eloquently fumed that persistent sickness is not a journey. “It’s endless, pointless and repetitive. There’s no new ground to gain here.” The cultural insistence on illness as a journey, from which a traveler can learn useful, or even life-changing lessons, becomes something to “disassociate from, survive, endure.” It “causes social isolation.”

Although she concedes its downsides, Stephanie Swanson likes to think of herself as on a journey. Swanson, who is 37 and lives in Kansas City, was an engineer by training, with three young children, a career and a sideline as an aerialist, when she got long Covid in the summer of 2022. The things that had made her successful — her physical stamina, her ability to solve problems — evaporated. “I’ve had to give up my career, my hobbies, my physical abilities,” she said. “I’ve gained 30 pounds on my tiny dancer body. I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”

Swanson makes a distinction between “journey” and “trip”: The latter is circumscribed by a start, an end, and hotel and restaurant reservations along the way. She sees “journey” as a way to capture the arc of a whole life.

When she was running operations at a medical center at the University of Kansas, she always imagined slowing down to enjoy her kids more or to read a book, but “I felt like my head was going to explode.” Now Swanson has become a person who must rent a wheelchair for her upcoming trip to New York City, and she likes how “journey” accommodates all the challenging, unexpected circumstances she confronts. “To me, the word ‘journey’ resonates with choosing to be on a path of acceptance but not standing still,” she said. “I’m not giving up, but recognizing that this is the path I’m on.”

Ramani Durvasula uses “journey” advisedly. A clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who treats women in emotionally abusive relationships, she recognizes how “journey” has been “eye-rollingly cheapened” and has started to experiment with alternatives. She’s tried “process.” She’s tried “healing trajectory.” But she falls back on journey, because it, more than any other word, expresses the step-by-step, sometimes circular or backward nature of enduring something hard. “Arguably, a journey doesn’t have a destination,” she said. “Have you ever taken a hike in a loop? And you end up exactly where you parked your car?”

But Durvasula does object to the easy-breezy healing so many journey hashtags promote, what she calls the “post-sobriety, post-weight-loss, now-I’m-in-love-again-after-my-toxic-relationship” reels. Too many TikToks show the crying in the car then the cute party dress, skipping over the middle, when people feel ugly, angry, self-loathing, and hopeless. “I want to see the hell,” she said. “I want to see the nightmare.”

When in 2020 a Swedish linguist named Charlotte Hommerberg studied how advanced cancer patients describe their experience, she found they used “battle” and “journey,” like everyone else. But most also used a third metaphor that conveyed not progress, fight or hope. They said cancer was like “imprisonment,” a feeling of being stuck — like a “free bird in a cage,” one person wrote. Powerless and going nowhere.

Read by Lisa Miller

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis .

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Synonyms and antonyms of journey in English

Word of the Day

hit the road

to leave a place or begin a journey

Searching out and tracking down: talking about finding or discovering things

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