pathway
Pluralpathways
- 1A footpath or other track for walking from one place to another.
A stone pathway wound between the flower beds toward the fountain.
The park's pathways were lined with old oak trees.
Similarpath, walkway, footpath, trail
Note
A compound that says the same thing twice: Middle English pathwei, simply path joined to way, with matching doubles in German Pfadweg and Afrikaans padweg. It names the humblest kind of route. L. Frank Baum, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), ranks it below a road: "no road—not even a pathway." The usual verbs are physical ones: you follow a pathway, go down it, and stand on it.
- 2A course of action chosen to reach a particular result.
The treaty offered a pathway to lasting peace between the two nations.
Each student can follow a different pathway through the training program.
Similarroute, path, road, avenue
Note
The figurative use usually points somewhere, and it takes to before its goal: the pathway to success. In healthcare management it has hardened into a term of its own. Amitabh Prakash's Acute Stroke Treatment (2000) sets clinical and critical pathways beside case management, where a pathway means a planned sequence of care for high-volume, high-cost conditions whose treatment follows a predictable pattern.
- 3In biochemistry, a chain of compounds and the reactions that convert one into the next, together making up a metabolic or catabolic process.
The glycolytic pathway converts glucose into pyruvate through a series of enzyme-driven steps.
Researchers mapped the metabolic pathways involved in cholesterol synthesis.
Note
In biochemistry the word names a chain rather than a place. Each compound in the sequence is converted into the next by a linking reaction, so the pathway is the whole route from starting material to end product. Pathways are usually named for what they build or break down, as in a biosynthesis pathway, a pyruvate oxidation pathway or the glycolytic pathway, and they are often spoken of in the plural.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English pathwei, equivalent to 'path' plus 'way', with cognates including German Pfadweg and Afrikaans padweg.