Other forms: hubs
The hub is the solid middle of a wheel — the block the axle runs through and the spokes all reach in to. Spin a bike wheel in the air and the rim blurs while the hub sits quiet at the centre, doing the real work.
From there the word went everywhere. A hub is the centre of any activity: the kitchen is the hub of the house, Singapore is a shipping hub, and an airline flies you through a hub airport where all its routes meet. In computing a hub is the small box everything else plugs into. It takes OF — the hub of the network, the hub of village life. And it is the middle part only, never the whole wheel.
1nounhubThe central part of a wheel, which the axle passes through and the spokes join.
“The bike shop replaced the bearings inside the front hub.”
2nouncentreThe centre of an activity, a network or a region — the point everything runs through.
“The town became a hub for cheap flights across Europe.”
synonyms: centre, nerve centre
3noundeviceA device that connects several computers or devices to one point.
“He plugged the keyboard and the drive into a single USB hub.”
hub is a central part.
Nobody knows where hub came from. It turns up as hubbe, a dialect word out of the English countryside, sharing an origin with hob. Its relatives may include German Hubbel, a bump on a surface, from a Germanic word for a bump or a hill — but the trail goes cold there and has stayed cold.
From earlier hubbe, which has the same immediate origin as hob. Hub was originally a dialectal word; its ultimate origin is unknown. Compare German Hubbel (“bump on a surface”), from Proto-West Germanic hubil (“bump, hill”) (which contains a diminutive suffix -il); compare hive, or perhaps ultimately from the same root as hip or hop.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA