Bike

How to spell bike

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bike

What does bike mean?

1. nounA two-wheeled vehicle that a rider propels by pedalling, or a motorcycle.
2. verbTo travel or commute by riding a bicycle.

Bike in a sentence

• noun

  She chained her bike to the railing outside the office.

• verb

  They prefer to bike to work whenever the weather is dry.

• noun

  He rode his bike along the canal path all afternoon.

• verb

  We plan to bike around the lake during the holiday weekend.

Where does bike come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Bike is a casual shortening of bicycle, which itself was assembled in the nineteenth century from the Latin prefix bi-, meaning 'two', joined to the Greek-derived word kuklos, meaning 'circle' or 'wheel'. The full term bicycle appeared in English around the 1860s as the two-wheeled pedal machine became popular, and within a couple of decades speakers had clipped it down to the snappier bike. The same clipping habit gave English trike from tricycle and the verb to bike, meaning to ride one. Because bike is simply a chopped version of the longer word, its spelling carries no hint of the bi- 'two' element, which is why few people connect the breezy four-letter form to its tidy Latin and Greek parentage. The word now covers both pedal cycles and motorcycles, depending on context.

How the word is built

• bike (clipped form of bicycle: bi- 'two'
• cycle 'wheel')