This eighth edition of the PIARC Technical Dictionary of Road Terms is an extract, obtained in May 2007, from the multilingual terminology database made available to the worldwide highways community in the Road Dictionary section on the PIARC website. This database is constantly updated by the PIARC Committee on Terminology, thanks to contributions from all PIARC Technical Committees and Working groups.

The extract comprises 1,684 terms expressed in five languages (in the following order: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese). The languages adopted as reference are the technical English used in the United Kingdom and the French used by professionals in France. Synonyms used in other countries speaking French (Belgium, Canada, Switzerland), English (Canada, United States), German (Austria, Switzerland) or Spanish (Latin America) are also presented. Terms recommended by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) or Technical Committees of the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) are included in this dictionary. However, owing to restrictions on space, neither the national or international origins, nor illustrations nor the grammatical attributes of the terms are included. The reader will find them on the website.

Each line provides the following information: the term, its definition (or a reference to the main term related to the concept involved), the term's code and its translation into the four other languages, always set out in the same order.

This dictionary was compiled in alphabetical order, as customary in dictionaries or glossaries. At the end of the dictionary a nomenclature with a logical methodical classification is presented, followed by the codes of all terms recorded.

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The on-line Road Dictionary is far more comprehensive than this printed version; moreover, it is regularly updated. It offers you to search for one word or part of a word in one language and to obain the results simultaneously in three languages, including the search language. Grammatical attributes, synonyms and their geographical origins, terminology classification and any illustration shown with the general term are displayed immediately.

The languages available on the Internet since January 2016 are: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, 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, owing to the unavoidable time gap between the updating of the terms in the reference languages (English and French) and their translation into other languages.

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Thanks to the interactivity provided by the Internet, you are invited to suggest the addition, amendment or deletion of a term directly on the website. Thus, with the involvement of PIARC's Technical Committees and everyone's contributions, this collective work will become a most valuable tool for both experts and the general public.

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The main contributors to this eighth edition were: Mrs Paula Freire (Portugal), Mr Hermann Fritz (Switzerland), Mr René Gemme (Canada), Mrs Annelies Glander (Austria), Mrs Cristina Higuera (Spain), Mr Hans-Walter Horz (Germany), Mr David Powell (United Kingdom), Mr Patrice Retour (France, chairman of the Committee on Terminology from 2002 to 2007) and Mr Daniël Verfaillie (Belgium, chairman of the Committee on Terminology since 2007).