18 March 2024
Cf. main drag
The use of Main Street and High Street is an example of the divergence of North American and British English. While both terms can be found on either side of the Atlantic, the former is more common in North America and the latter in the UK. Both are terms for the principal road in a town, and both have become metonyms for aspects of urban life. In this case, the divergence appears to be the result of a Darwinian selection process—the need for new street names in North America opened up a lexical niche that coincided with a shift in the meaning of the adjectives main and high, which favored main as the choice for the new roads.
Both main and high trace back to Old English, but their relevant adjectival uses are somewhat more recent. Main comes from the Old English noun mægn, meaning strength or might. It appears in this sense in the poem Beowulf:
Heold hine fæste
se þe manna wæs mægene strengest
on þæm dæge þysses lifes.
(He held him fast, he who of humans was strongest of might in that day of this life.)
The adjectival use of main to mean principal or chief is in place by the mid sixteenth century, about the time Europeans began to establish colonies in the Americas. We see it in an inventory of a minor noble’s household goods:
A louse beddstedd of waynscott iij s. iiij d. Twoo great standing chestes withe one mayne cheste—vj s. viij d.
In contrast, the Old English adjective heah, “tall, lofty, exalted,” could also signify “principal.” Heah burh or heah ceaster, for example, means “principal or capital city.”
As street names, High Street is older than Main Street, dating to the Old English heahstræte, which appears multiple times in charters, usually in the context of denoting the boundaries of a parcel of land.
Highway also makes a single appearance in the extant Old English corpus, in a Kentish charter in the phrase cyniges heiweg. But the etymology of this word is disputed. The first element could be hay or hedge, making the phrase king’s hay-way or king’s hedge-way instead of king’s highway. But the word survived into and prospered in Middle and Modern English.
The phrase main street, as a descriptor, not a name, is in place by 1591 when it appears in William Garrard’s The Arte of Warre (the book was published posthumously; Garrard had died in 1587):
Directly from this towards the North, runneth one maine stréete 40 pace brode, that deuideth the horse campe from the foot campe.
The earliest recorded use of Main Street as a name for a road that I’m aware of is in an 1810 description of Chillicothe, Ohio.
Water street which runs about E. by N. parallel to the Scioto, is half a mile long, and contains ninety houses. […] Main street, parallel to Water street, is one hundred feet wide, as is Market street which crosses both at right angles.
There is no authoritative list of the most common street names in either the United States or Britain, probably because it’s not an easy question to answer. Besides the mammoth task of gathering the data, interpreting which are distinct streets can be tricky. For example, is North Main Street distinct from South Main Street?
If one googles the question for Britain, the answer that is invariably given is that High Street is the most common road name in the UK. Of course, most of these sites give no indication of what the source of their data is. But a 2020 analysis appearing in Towardsdatascience.com that is based on Ordnance Survey data confirms that High Street is the most common in England and Wales, followed by Station Road and Main Street coming in third. Scotland, of course, goes its own way, with Main Street topping the list.
And in 2015, the Washington Post took a stab at it for the United States. Park was the most common street name, followed by Second in second place. Main and First are further down the list, probably because they knocked each other out of contention for first place. Main is, however, the most popular street name in Maine.
Both terms have spawned metonymic uses, indicating that they have become ingrained in their respective national psyches. Main Street has been a metonym for small-town America since at least 1916, a use popularized by Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel of that name. The metonym originally had a pejorative cast, representing provincial and unenlightened opinion, but seems to have meliorated in recent years and now represents common-sense, middle-class values and is often used in opposition to the business interests of Wall Street. In Canada, the name has also generated mainstreeting and to mainstreet, terms for retail political campaigning, perhaps coined and certainly popularized by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in the late 1950s. Across the Atlantic, by the early 1970s, High Street, because streets with that name were commonly fronted by shops, had become a metonym for the retail sector of the economy.
More likely the divergence between the British High Street and the North American Main Street is simply due to the opening of a lexical niche with the creation of cities and streets in the New World and the decline in the use of high to mean “principal.” The streets on the new continent had to be named something, and Main just happened to gain a beachhead, perhaps because at the time the meaning of high was being narrowed, and its use as a descriptor seemed more enigmatic. Main Street is the third most popular street name in the UK, but in the old country without the opening of the niche by new construction, this popularity simply did not have the ability to overcome the 500-year head start of the already established High Street.
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