This word comes straight from Latin. In the Roman empire, a terminus was a boundary stone, and all boundary stones had a minor god associated with them, whose name was Terminus. Terminus was a kind of keeper of the peace, since wherever there was a terminus there could be no arguments about where your property ended and your neighbor's property began. So Terminus even had his own festival, the Terminalia, when images of the god were draped with flower garlands. Today the word shows up in all kinds of places, including in the name of numerous hotels worldwide built near a city's railway terminus.
Examples of terminus in a Sentence
Stockholm is the terminus for the southbound train.
Geologists took samples from the terminus of the glacier.
the terminus of the DNA strand
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Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Civil work has finished at six out of eight stations in Gujarat, while Mumbai's underground terminus at Bandra Kurla Complex is 75 percent excavated.—Theo Burman, MSNBC Newsweek, 6 June 2025 They were last seen Sunday morning on the Katahdin Tablelands heading toward the summit, which is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail and located in Baxter State Park.—Meredith Deliso, ABC News, 3 June 2025 Our Western inheritance, then: the concept of the deep underground as wasteland, dump, terminus of the unredeemable.—Literary Hub, 11 June 2025 This was to be a way station, not a terminus; after disembarking there, immigrants would be encouraged to fan out, helping to establish Jewish communities throughout the southwestern half of the nation.—Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, 28 Apr. 2025 See All Example Sentences for terminus
Word History
Etymology
Latin, boundary marker, limit — more at term entry 1
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