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Consider:

I went around to the post office/my sister's house.

I went along to the post office/my sister's house.

I went over to the post office/my sister's house.

I went down to the post office/my sister's house.

Any nuances about the distance, how I got to the place, etc?

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  • Assuming that you went X to some place, go around to 4. to visit a person or a place; go along to go to a place or event, usually without much planning; go over to 3. to move or travel towards someone or something; go down 6. to travel towards the south (a. BrE: to travel to a place that is smaller or less important than where you are)
    – Damkerng T.
    May 2, 2014 at 13:30
  • That's not the whole story, I might think. But I am sorry not to be able to provide any context. @Damkerng T
    – Kinzle B
    May 2, 2014 at 13:41
  • And what if the main verb is not "go", but "come", "walk", "move", etc? That's why I didn't mark "went" bold in my question.
    – Kinzle B
    May 2, 2014 at 13:58
  • If you asked that it would sound to me like, "What does X (e.g. around) mean when it is used with any of all possible verbs", and that would be too broad of a question. I don't like to say that we might need to learn the sense of each preposition being used in each specific case one case at a time, but it sadly seems to be so, in my opinion.
    – Damkerng T.
    May 2, 2014 at 14:04

2 Answers 2

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Lots of prepositions can be optionally added after to go [to some place]...

around (or more commonly, round) - the former is often in contexts where the route is circuitous/indirect ("I went around to my sister's house on the other side of the lake"). Note that when round is used, to is very often omitted ("On Fridays I go round my sister's for dinner").

across - places more emphasis on the terrain to be crossed. Perhaps because your sister's house is on the other side of town (or the street). Perhaps because you used a boat to get across the lake.

along - often implies "on foot", and/or a relatively short distance. May also imply an unplanned or trivial action, and/or a journey accompanied by or intending to meet up with other people.

over - similar to across and along.

down (or up) - often reflects either a literal height difference, or figurative (e.g. - up = towards a major population centre).

out - often implies leaving the building you started from and/or going outside.

by - implies your visit to the other location was brief, and/or was a diversion from your current route.

There are almost certainly other equally common alternatives that I can't think of offhand.

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To answer your specific question, yes. They all imply the post office is a convenient distence from your starting point.

If the post office was far, you would say:

I wen all the way to the post office.

"along" however does not belong with the rest. "I went along" means you accompanied someone else to the post office, but it was not necessarily your destination.

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