Other forms: pedals, pedaling, pedalling
A pedal is the part you push with your foot to make a machine work. The two on a bicycle that go round with your legs; the brake and the accelerator down in the footwell of a car.
Pianos have pedals too — the right one holds the notes ringing on, the left softens them — and so do drum kits, sewing machines and guitar effects boxes. As a verb, to pedal is to push the pedals: she pedalled all the way up the hill without stopping. British English doubles the l (pedalled, pedalling) and American English does not. The dangerous lookalike is peddle, which means to sell things, and back-pedal means to take back what you just said.
1nounpedalA flat part pushed by the foot to drive or control a machine.~39%
“He kept his foot on the brake pedal.”
2nounleverA foot lever on a piano or other instrument that changes the sound.~56%
“Hold the right pedal down for the last chord.”
3verbmoveTo move a bicycle along by pushing the pedals.~5%
“She pedalled slowly through the park.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
pedal is a foot-operated lever.
A pedal is a foot. The word came from French pédale, borrowed from Italian pedale, from Latin pedālis, and at the far end of the line sits the Proto-Indo-European root *ped-, foot. Every pedal you have ever pushed is named after the thing pushing it.
Proto-Indo-European
*ped-
French
pédale
English, today
pedal
Borrowed from French pédale. French pédale, itself borrowed from Italian pedale, from Latin pedālis. by surface analysis, ped- + -al.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA