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PIARC (World Road Association), founded in 1909 and comprising 125 member governments from all over the world, is the global forum for exchange of knowledge and experience on roads, road transport policies and practices. With consultative status to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, the Association is contributing to a stable and sustainable global development of the road and transport sector.

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Road Dictionary

« To understand and make oneself understood »

In 1931, the first edition of the "Technical Dictionary of Road Terms" was published in six languages: Danish, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. PIARC (World Road Association) has continued working on terminology ever since. In 2007, the eighth - and last hard-copy - edition was released in five languages: English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

The multilingual terminology database can be accessed on-line on the PIARC website for specific term and/or per theme searching, and the search results can be displayed simultaneously in three languages.

PIARC multilingual terminology database

The multilingual terminology database of PIARC (World Road Association) has been created by merging the Technical Dictionary of Road Terms, the Lexicon of Road and Traffic Engineering, and a number of specialized dictionaries in the field of roads and road transport. It will, henceforth, be on-line as a single "PIARC Road Dictionary".

Responsibility of the Committee on Terminology

The Committee on Terminology is reponsible for updating and upgrading this Road Dictionary,with inputs from the experts in the Technical Committees and with the help of National Committees and member countries for translations into other languages than English and French.

You are invited:
to contribute on-line towards upgrading and extending this Dictionary, by submitting your proposals to the Committee on Terminology for careful consideration.

Road Dictionary

The Road Dictionary is compiled with technical terms in English and French available at the time and currently contains some 16,300 concepts in these reference languages. It is gradually extended by adding other languages. Its electronic version available on-line as from 2016 by now contains 35 other languages: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. However, the input of equivalent terms is as yet incomplete in most of these languages.

Synonyms used in other countries speaking French (Belgium, Canada, Switzerland), English (Canada, United States), German (Austria, Switzerland) or Spanish (Latin America) are also presented and tagged with the standardized two-letter acronyms of their countries of origin. Terms and/or definitions recommended by other organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization [ISO], Technical Committees of the European Committee for Standardization [CEN], the Nordic Road Association [NVF] or the Office québécois de la langue française [OQLF], or found in European standards [EN ...], have been included as well.

The term and its definition, if any, are complemented by grammatical attributes (where necessary), synonyms, if any, a code for classification in the nomenclature and, sometimes, an illustration.