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Zelda Thuong
2021-03-14 08:03
Underway British American adjective
This word is also known as "under way".
The project is underway without any difficulty.
Preparations are well underway for the most important event of Mary's life.
If an activity is underway, it has already started. If an activity gets underway, it starts or move.
This word is used as an adjective in sentence, and it is only after verb like be or get, not before noun.
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(Image source: phrases.org.uk)
The word "way" here doesn't mean road or route but has the specifically nautical meaning of "the forward progress of a ship though the water", or the wake that the ship leaves behind.
Actually, the term "under sail" and "underway" appear at first sight to be quite similar. The former seems easy to interpret, as sailing ships are literally under the sails when in motion, but what are we under in "underway"? That is easier to understand when we know that this "under" was originally "on the". Knowing that, "on the way" makes sense. "On the way" migrated to "underway", probably due to the influence of the Dutch word "onderweg", which translates into English as "underway" but to 17th century sailors must have sounded more like "on the way".
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