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Boulevard

[bool-uh-vahrd, boo-luh-]

noun

a broad avenue in a city, usually having areas at the sides or center for trees, grass, or flowers.

Also called boulevard strip. Upper Midwest. a strip of lawn between a sidewalk and the curb.

Origin:
1765–75; < French, Middle French (orig. Picard, Walloon): rampart, avenue built on the site of a razed rampart < Middle Dutch bol(le)werc; see bulwark

Synonyms
See street.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Boulevard is always a great word to know.

So is gobo. Does it mean:

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle.

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Example Sentences

Stunning women in scant spring dresses mobbed the sunny boulevard.

Cruise ships dock here regularly, spilling hundreds of tourists onto the main waterfront boulevard.

The pic shows that the boulevard around the corner is a pretty barren wasteland, tree-wise.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

boulevard (ˈbuːlvɑː, -vɑːd)

—n
1.	a. a wide usually tree-lined road in a city, often used as a promenade
	b. (capital as part of a street name): Sunset Boulevard
2.	chiefly (Canadian)
	a. a grass strip between the pavement and road
	b. the strip of ground between the edge of a private property and the road
	c. the centre strip of a road dividing traffic travelling in different directions

[C18: from French, from Middle Dutch bolwercbulwark; so called because originally often built on the ruins of an old rampart]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

boulevard

1769, from Fr. boulevard (15c.), originally "top surface of a military rampart," from a garbled attempt to adopt M.Du. bolwerc "wall of a fortification" (see bulwark) into French, which lacks a -w-. The original notion is of a promenade laid out atop demolished city walls,

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which would be much wider than urban streets. Originally in English with conscious echoes of Paris; since 1929, in U.S., used of multi-lane limited-access urban highways. Early French attempts to digest the Dutch word also include boloart, boulever, boloirque, bollvercq.

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Champs Élysées concourse neutral ground

Matching Quote

"And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion."

-Vladimir Nabokov

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Boulevard

boul·e·vard