Biking

How to spell biking

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce biking

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biking mean?

1. nounThe activity or pastime of riding a bicycle.
2. verbPresent participle of bike: travelling or exercising by bicycle.

Biking in a sentence

• noun

  Mountain biking is her favourite weekend activity.

• verb

  They were biking along the canal path all afternoon.

• noun

  The resort offers biking trails through the forest.

• verb

  She spent the holiday biking across the countryside.

Where does biking come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word grows out of 'bike', the casual shortening of 'bicycle' that took hold in everyday English during the late nineteenth century. 'Bicycle' itself was assembled in the 1860s from the Latin prefix bi-, meaning 'two', joined to a form of the Greek kyklos, meaning 'circle' or 'wheel', so the whole idea is literally a 'two-wheeler'. As soon as 'bike' became the familiar noun, English added the productive ending -ing to name the activity of riding one, giving us 'biking'. The spelling drops the silent 'e' of 'bike' before the suffix, which is the small trap here: it is 'biking', not 'bikeing'. The same kyklos root still turns up in words such as 'cycle', 'recycle' and 'encyclopedia', all of which carry the sense of something circular or coming round again.

How the word is built

• bike (clipped from bicycle: bi- 'two'
• cycle 'wheel')
• -ing (forming a noun or participle)