means a narrow road or marked strip of a larger road, path, or track meant to keep traffic—cars, runners, bowling balls—moving in tidy single file

from From Old English 'lane' or 'lone,' meaning a narrow way or passage, and a close cousin of words in Old Frisian and Dutch ('laan') for the same idea. For most of its life it simply meant a small country road squeezed between hedges or houses; the painted-stripe sense on highways and the swimming-and-bowling sense are modern stretches of that ancient narrowness.