رضا: I'd use:

1) journey
2) trip
3) trip
4) outing
5) journey

رضا:
1) trip
2) excursion
3) trip
4) excursion
5) excursion (short time), holiday (longer time), journey (longest time, i think)

رضا: You guys obviously aren't from Southern California and the land of freeways, cars, and traffic! :)
It's a trip to work. There are statistics that call them trips or cartrips.

Going to work can be a journey or a voyage or often times an adventure. It is quite common for people to drive over 50 miles one way to get to work. I used to work in downtown Los Angeles and it is 34 miles one way from here. "Good morning commuters, there's big rig jackknifed on the 405 at Imperial and it's caused a Sigalert, you'd better use an alternate route. Let's talk to Jeff in the 'copter over the six car pile up at the 605 and 91." And when it rains around here, it's a real mess. Good thing it doesn't snow. At least twenty radio stations will broadcast traffic conditions throughout the day. Two of them, KNX 1070 and KFW 980, do it every six to ten minutes. We have a lot of television stations do it too.

Drive is the other word that would be used.

For sentence 1, I'd use "trip" from your list, but it'd be common to hear "drive" or "commute" around here.

For sentence 2, I'd use "trip" from your list. Vacation would be common and if by ship you'd hear cruise. Canadians use the word "holiday" as Americans use the word "vacation."

Because of the word "day" in front of your blank in sentence 3, about the only word I would use is "trip." A day trip is a common expression for a trip that has you returning to the starting point the same day. It's said of hiking too.

For sentence 4 from your list, "excursion" might be used. I wouldn't use outing for part of a paid and organized trip. Outing to me is something spontaneous that a family might do, like jump in the car and just head off until something comes up or maybe just head to the beach to spend the day and walk around. I've seen another word for this in travel brochures, but it escapes me right now. It could also be called a "side trip", but I doubt if they'd word it that way in an advertisement. "Tour" is the word I'm thinking of. A full day tour or guided tour.

Sentence 5. Trip or journey seem OK to me. Journey usually implies having to make extra effort to get to somewhere, and the Himalayas qualify.
_________ _________ __________ _________ _______

Voyage doesn't have to be by ship or even a trip to anywhere. It is sometimes said when one is going through life that you're on a voyage. Or a voyage of time. It can also be used for a land crossing, but it's not a very commonly used word. It is as you say much more common for use with travelling by water, but also some type of conveyance. So a train trip could be a voyage across a continent or said of a covered wagon from the pioneer days to cross the continent.

Excursion is not word too many people use. Now that Ford has made this giant SUV and named it the "Excursion" I only hear it when someone is talking about those. The word has a thrusting connotation to it to me and I think of military terminology when I hear it. I suppose it can used to describe some types of trips or vacations.

Walter Montego: Thanks for your post. Especially for the remark concerning 'outing'. Another piece of knowledge to my puzzle.

I know nothing about Japanese so I can't confirm that, but it may well be true...:)

Pedro Martínez: yes, only 1 case .. but we had mores cases (i think similar to german, or maybe 1 less, german has 5 cases isnt it ? or is that ancient greek and ancient latin has 4 ? i am always confused :))

ancient greek didnt have articles i think .. its been 10 years since i had it though, and we were only taught to translate ancient greek readings to dutch

Hrqls: german has 4 and ancient latin 5, they had the ablative!

Walter Montego: Thanks for the post. So I take it the use of these words is related to the distance one is going or what?

If it's related to the distance, then how ould you arrange them from the shortest to the longest?

excursion trip journey voyage ?

But you also mentioned that journey has some sort of difficulty in it. So that's a good point to have in mind.


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Hrqls: Learning Greek would be logical to me, but what would you need ancient Greek for?

رضا: why would someone learn ancient latin ? why would someone learn ancient greek ?

the only real reason i can think of would be to study ancient texts in their original language

as i am not linguist, and never will be one, my skills are more in the mathematical field, i will never translate any ancient texts .... but i did have some benefits from learning to read ancient greek and ancient latin .. it made it easier for me to understand other foreign languages. i never learned any italian or spanish, but having had ancient latin i can roughly read spanish and italian news papers. i never found a language which made me think of ancient greek .. but maybe i might have some use for it when i visit greece? .. at least it helped me during my physics study because i know the names for the symbols used to the angles .. other students always used the wrong names .. lots of fun :)

other than that i have no real use for having had those languages in school .. but since i went to a 'gymnasium-only' school i had to have both language and have exam in at least one of them (i chose ancient greek as those texts were more interesting, and the language seems more fun, and because we just had the gerundivum (i think?) with ancient latin just before we had to chose which we would do exam in .. so i dropped latin as i didnt like that special case ;))

Hrqls: the only real reason i can think of would be to study ancient texts in their original language
Or to better understand how a certain language evolved.

For instance, if you study latin, you may have an easier task finding similarities between french, spanish, italian and portuguese and understand them easier, since you'll know a strong common root between them.
(It doesn't mean you'll know how to speak them well. Linguists in so many languages are rare - but you'll understand them fair enough)

pauloaguia: *nod* thats the main profit that i have from having learned ancient latin and ancient greek .. some languages look like latin, but more importantly i learned how certain language groups are built and can expand on that when i hear a new language .. it certainly helps me when i am in a forgeign country :)