lanes

A regular plural that carries every meaning of the singular: hedged country lanes, the marked strips of a highway, and the separated tracks that keep runners on a racetrack and swimmers in a pool apart. Context does the sorting, so "all three lanes" is traffic and "narrow lanes" is countryside. In the plural alone the word also names a place to go bowling and one side of a divided highway.

American highway talk, where the plural names a direction of travel rather than a count of strips: the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 are one side of the road, however many strips that side holds. The phrase nearly always pairs a compass adjective such as northbound, southbound or eastbound with a road name, which is how a traffic report tells one side from the other.

A bowler's shorthand that names the whole building after its playing strips. It almost always takes the definite article (down at the lanes, off to the lanes) and stays plural even for a single venue, so people say "the old lanes closed," never "the old lane." It belongs to casual talk, and where precision matters, bowling alley is the safer phrase.