Hub

How to spell hub

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hub

What does hub mean?

1. nounA central point around which activity, traffic, or connections are concentrated.
2. nounThe central part of a wheel, fan, or propeller, into which the axle or spokes are fixed.

Hub in a sentence

• The airport serves as a major hub for international flights.

• The mechanic greased the hub of the front wheel before fitting the cap.

• The new office became the hub of the company's research work.

• Each spoke of the bicycle wheel radiates from the central hub.

Where does hub come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hub is a homely English word whose deeper origins are genuinely murky. It first surfaces in writing in the seventeenth century meaning the solid central block of a wheel, the part into which the spokes are fixed and through which the axle passes. Many scholars think it is the same word as 'hob', the raised shelf or projecting lump at the side or back of a fireplace, since both describe a stout central or projecting mass. From the very concrete idea of the middle of a wheel, the word grew a powerful figurative life in the nineteenth century, coming to mean any central point around which activity revolves, and later still it was adopted by engineers and network designers for a central connecting device. Because the spelling is short and entirely phonetic, the only thing to remember is that it is the plain three letters h, u, b, with no silent companions.

How the word is built

• hub (a single root noun of uncertain origin, possibly a dialect variant of 'hob', the projecting part of a fireplace)