Tire

How to spell tire

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tire

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tire mean?

1. verbTo become weary, or to make someone weary.
2. nounThe rubber covering fitted around the rim of a wheel.

Tire in a sentence

• verb

  Long meetings always seem to tire the whole team by mid-afternoon.

• noun

  He changed the flat tire on the side of the motorway.

• verb

  Older runners tire more quickly on steep hills.

• noun

  The mechanic checked the pressure in each tire before the trip.

Where does tire come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The verb sense of tire, meaning to grow weary, descends from the Old English teorian, which meant 'to fail, cease, or become exhausted'. Its earlier history is uncertain, and it has no clear relatives in the other Germanic languages, so scholars cannot trace it confidently beyond Old English. The noun meaning the rubber covering of a wheel has a quite separate and surprising origin: it is a shortened form of 'attire', because the band of metal or rubber was thought of as the 'clothing' or covering fitted around the outside of a wheel. That older spelling survives in Britain as 'tyre', while American and Canadian usage settled on 'tire' for the wheel as well as the verb. The two meanings therefore look identical in American and Canadian English even though they arrived by completely different routes, which is part of why the spelling can feel slippery.

How the word is built

• tire (single root; verb from Old English teorian 'to fail, become weary')

British and American spelling

Tire is the American spelling. British English spells it tyre.