intersection

What it means

1. The junction of two (or more) paths, streets, highways, or other thoroughfares.

   Near-synonym: crossroads

   1 more example

   We determined that the car driver’s transportation of multiple teen passengers, limited driving experience, and likely impairment from effects of cannabis at the time of the crash adversely affected her judgment of the danger of entering the intersection in front of the approaching combination vehicle.

   2024, NTSB, Intersection Crash Between Passenger Car and Combination Vehicle, Tishomingo, Oklahoma, March 22, 2022

   Synonyms: crossroads, crossroads

2. Any overlap, confluence, or crossover.

   Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little.

   2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings of ASIALEX 2015 Hong Kong, Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, page 147

3. geometryThe point or set of points common to two geometrical objects (such as the point where two lines meet or the line where two planes intersect).

In a sentence

Near-synonym: crossroads

Where it comes from

1. Latinintersectiō
2. Middle Frenchintersection
3. Englishintersection

From Middle French intersection and its etymon Latin intersectiō. By surface analysis, intersect + -ion.