desire line

desire line

English

WOTD – 1 September 2017

Pronunciation

A desire line on the left of a paved path in Parc Central de Nou Barris in Barcelona, Spain

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /dɪˈzaɪə laɪn/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /dɪˈzaɪɹ laɪn/, /di-/, /-ˈzaɪɚ/

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Hyphenation: de‧si‧re line

Noun

desire line (plural desire lines)

1. A path that pedestrians or vehicles take informally rather than taking a sidewalk or set route, for example, a well-worn ribbon of dirt cutting across a patch of grass, or a path in the snow.
   • 1947, Missouri State Highway Department; Public Roads Administration, Federal Works Agency [United States], A Traffic Survey of St. Louis Metropolitan Area, [Jefferson, Mo.]: The Department, OCLC 7419242, page 24, column 2:

     The grouping of like trips for all passenger cars, taxi-cabs and trucks resulted in 3580 desire lines, varying in volume from one trip to 5200 trips. It is obvious that if all the desire lines were illustrated graphically on one chart the result would be a maze of lines that would be confusing.

   • 1987 August, Thomas Frick, “Rebuilding Central Park”, in Technology Review, Cambridge, Mass.: Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ISSN 0040-1692, OCLC 985742712:

     Study participants also drew charts of pedestrian traffic to take note of what are delightfully termed "desire lines" – paths actually made by walkers as opposed to those created on the drawing board.

   • 2003 January 5, Patricia Leigh Brown, “Whose sidewalk is it, anyway?”, in The New York Times‎, archived from the original on 27 May 2015:

     In areas with no sidewalks, beaten-down paths in the grass, known as "desire lines" in planning-speak, indicate yearning, said John La Plante, the chief traffic engineer for T. Y. Lin International, an engineering firm.

Synonyms

• desire path

Translations

informally taken path

Arabic: مَسْلَك بَرِّيّ‎ m (maslak barriyy) Dutch: olifantenpad (nl) n Finnish: oikopolku (fi) French: ligne de désir f German: Trampelpfad (de) m Hindi: please add this translation if you can Hungarian: please add this translation if you can Indonesian: please add this translation if you can Irish: mianlíne f Italian: please add this translation if you can Japanese: please add this translation if you can Korean: please add this translation if you can Macedonian: прт m (prt) (path made in the snow), пртина f (prtina) (path made in the snow) Malay: please add this translation if you can Portuguese: caminho de desejo m, linha de desejo f Russian: please add this translation if you can Spanish: please add this translation if you can Turkish: patika (tr), çığır (tr), keçi yolu (tr), yolak (tr)

Further reading

• desire path on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Paul McFedries (8 January 2003), “desire line”, in Word Spy, Logophilia Limited, retrieved 4 June 2017.