highways and byways

English

Noun

highways and byways pl (plural only)

1. Collectively, the roads and paths of a given place.
   • 1924, Isaiah Bowman, Desert Trails of Atacama, pages 19-20:

     But even if railroads are run across the mountains or the desert reclaimed by scientific methods of investigation or rubber gathered, as it was until recently, in enormous quantities in all the highways and byways of a once impenetrable forest, still all these are done by such methods and at such an expense of human energy and of capital, even of life, as to make them examples not of sheer human conquest but of a conditional conquest.