Hubs

How to spell hubs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hubs

What does hubs mean?

1. nounCentral points of activity, connection, or control from which other things radiate or are coordinated.
2. nounThe central parts of wheels into which the spokes are fixed and through which the axles pass.

Hubs in a sentence

• The airline routes most of its flights through three regional hubs.

• The mechanic greased the hubs before refitting the wheels.

• London and Frankfurt remain the busiest financial hubs in Europe.

• Worn hubs caused the bicycle wheels to wobble badly.

Where does hubs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The singular 'hub' first appears in English around the 1640s, originally naming the solid central block of a wheel into which the spokes are fixed and through which the axle passes. Its earliest origins are genuinely obscure, but most scholars connect it to 'hob', the projecting back part of a fireplace, and to a sense of a lump or rounded protuberance; the two words seem to have been variants of one another in regional English speech. From the literal wheel sense, 'hub' grew its familiar figurative meaning of a central point of activity or connection, a use that took firm hold in the nineteenth century, when Boston was famously dubbed the 'hub of the universe'. The plural simply adds '-s', and because the word ends in a single 'b' there is no doubling, giving the straightforward 'hubs'. The modern airport and computer-network senses are twentieth-century extensions of that same idea of a busy centre from which lines radiate.

How the word is built

• hub (central point)
• -s (plural)