by-path

(bī′păth′, -päth′)

An indirect or rarely used path.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

by′-path`

or by′path`,

n., pl. -paths (-ˌpæðz, -ˌpɑðz, -ˌpæθs, -ˌpɑθs)

a secondary path; byway.

[1325–75]

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

Then they sighed: "O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!" Then they contrived for themselves their by-paths and bloody draughts!

View in context

If the point of intellectual history is track the ancestry of our ideas, Dee's work is a by-path, a dead end, finally, in the genealogy of thought, but if history is to be about the past in its own terms, Clulee's superb book offers us a voyage on the busiest highways of early modern culture.

John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion

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