Sport & ContestGreek → English
Cycling
/ˈsaɪklɪŋ/noun
Riding a bicycle, as sport or as transport.
The Greek roots
κύκλος
kýklos
circle, wheel
Literally: “going by wheel”
Follow a root:κύκλος14 words
The story of the word
The bicycle was named in French around 1868, Latin bi- stuck onto Greek κύκλος, and English clipped it to cycle almost at once, which is where the verb and then cycling came from. Κύκλος is a wheel before it is an abstraction: Homer uses it of chariot wheels, and the Cyclops is κύκλωψ, wheel-eyed, for the one round eye. Henry Piddington built cyclone on the same idea in 1848, for the coil of a tropical storm.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1870s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
bicyclecycloneencyclopediacyclops
In a sentence
He took up cycling at fifty and now rides further than his sons.