Motorbike

How to spell motorbike

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce motorbike

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does motorbike mean?

1. nounA two-wheeled vehicle powered by an engine, ridden like a bicycle.

Motorbike in a sentence

• He rode his motorbike to work to avoid the traffic.

• The insurance on a motorbike costs more than on her car.

Where does motorbike come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound, stitching together 'motor' and 'bike'. 'Motor' comes from the Latin motor, meaning 'a mover' or 'one who sets in motion', built on the verb movere 'to move'; by the late nineteenth century it had attached itself to the new petrol engines that powered vehicles. 'Bike' is simply a casual clipping of 'bicycle', a word assembled from the Latin-derived prefix bi- 'two' and the Greek kuklos 'wheel'. Put together, the term emerged in English in the early twentieth century to describe a powered two-wheeler, sitting alongside the longer and more formal 'motorcycle'. Because both halves are familiar everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the compound holds no real spelling surprises.

How the word is built

• motor (engine, from Latin motor 'mover')
• bike (clipping of bicycle)