sand hill road
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.24 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
1
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
An arterial road in western Silicon Valley, California, running through Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Woodside, notable for its concentration of venture capital firms' offices.
name
A neighborhood of Palo Alto, California, named after the road.
name
The Californian venture capital industry, including its influence on Big Tech and biotech.
Example Sentences
- "Holonym: Silicon Valley"
- "There was a time when funding for internet start-ups was so easy that what came to matter was not how much you could get but where it came from. And if you got it from Sand Hill Road, Wall Street regarded that much as Catholics regard a benediction from the Pope."
- "Yet there is little visible gloom along Sand Hill Road, a suburban business neighborhood where office real estate is among the most expensive in the world."
- "Near-synonym: Silicon Valley"
- "Bryce Roberts said, “It has to be a way of disrupting Sand Hill Road”—where a number of the Valley’s top venture firms reside."
- "Such numbers aren’t everything to a candidate running for the president of the entire country and not just Sand Hill Road, especially at a point in the campaign when many donors are hedging their bets by backing multiple candidates."
Etymology
The road and its name existed in the 1920s and possibly before. The road was evidently named as a route toward a place called Sand Hill, but the Sand Hill in Oakley is not the referent, as it lies in a distant part of the Bay Area. The neighborhood sense and the venture-capital industry sense are by metonymy and are many decades newer.