Pedal

How to spell pedal

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pedal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pedal mean?

1. nounA lever operated by the foot, as on a bicycle, car, or musical instrument.
2. verbTo move a bicycle or machine by working the pedals with the feet.

Pedal in a sentence

• noun

  His foot slipped off the brake pedal at the junction.

• verb

  She had to pedal hard to reach the top of the hill.

• noun

  The right pedal on her bicycle had worked loose.

• verb

  He liked to pedal slowly along the canal path each morning.

Where does pedal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin pedalis, meaning 'of or relating to the foot', which was built on pes (genitive pedis), the ordinary Latin word for a foot. It first arrived in English in the 1600s as a musical term for the foot-operated levers of an organ, and by the 1700s it had spread to any lever or treadle worked by the foot. The same pes root sits inside a whole family of familiar words, from 'pedestrian' and 'pedestal' to 'pedicure' and even 'centipede', so remembering that pedal is about feet anchors the 'ped' spelling. That foot origin is the key to keeping it apart from 'peddle', which means to sell and comes from an entirely unrelated word, and from 'petal', the part of a flower. The verb sense, to work pedals or to ride by pedalling, grew naturally out of the noun in the nineteenth century alongside the bicycle.

How the word is built

• ped- (from Latin pes, pedis: foot)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)