Definition:

1. A road passing around a town or part of a town to provide an alternative route for traffic
2. A secondary channel, pipe, or connection to allow a flow when the main one is closed or blocked.

Etymology: Bypass is of fairly recent origin, first implied in English in 1823 by the term “to pass by,” and then appearing in English in 1848 to identify a small pipe in a gasworks that passed around a valve, think pilot light.

By 1922, bypass was being used to define roads designed for the relief of congestion necessitated by Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line for cars, fully operational by 1913.

After the first coronary artery bypass operation in the United States on May 2, 1960, the coronary bypass procedure appeared in the lexicon.

In a Sentence

The bypass added thirty minutes to our drive.

The bypass around the stadium was congested.

Without a heart bypass, the patient will die.