Motorcycle

How to spell motorcycle

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce motorcycle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does motorcycle mean?

1. nounA two-wheeled motor vehicle driven by an internal engine.

Motorcycle in a sentence

• He saved for a year to buy a second-hand motorcycle.

• Riding a motorcycle on the motorway requires a full licence and a helmet.

Where does motorcycle come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound built from two older borrowings. The first part, motor, comes from the Latin motor, meaning 'a mover', from movere 'to move'; in the late nineteenth century it became the everyday word for an engine. The second part, cycle, traces back to the Greek kyklos, meaning 'wheel' or 'circle', the same root that gives us bicycle and circle. The two were joined in the 1890s, just as petrol engines were being fitted to pedal cycles, to name a two-wheeled vehicle driven by its own engine. The spelling stays transparent once you see the join: motor plus cycle, with the tricky middle vowel being the 'y' inherited from the Greek kyklos rather than an 'i'.

How the word is built

• motor (from Latin motor: mover)
• cycle (from Greek kyklos: wheel, circle)