Other forms: riding, rode, rides, ridden
To ride is to sit on something that carries you along and travel on it — a bike, a horse, a motorbike. Legs either side, hands on the bars or the reins, moving.
You also ride on public transport: ride the bus, ride the train, and in American English ride the lift up. As a noun, a ride is the journey itself — a ten-minute ride to the station — or the machine at a fair: the big wheel, the ghost train, all the rides. The forms are irregular, so learn them together: ride, rode, ridden. Surfers ride waves, jockeys ride for a living, and if you give someone a ride you drive them there. It runs loose in phrases too: let it ride means leave the thing alone, and riding on something means depending on it — 'a lot is riding on this meeting'.
1verbrideTo sit on a bicycle, horse or motorbike and travel on it.~2%
“She rides to work every morning, whatever the weather.”
2verbpassengerTo travel in or on a vehicle as a passenger.~6%
“They ride the train into town together every morning.”
3nounjourneyA journey on a horse or bike, or in a vehicle.~11%
“It's a short ride from here to the beach.”
4nounmachineA machine at a fair or theme park that people go on for fun.~81%
“The children wanted to go on every ride twice.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 17 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Ride is one of the ancient ones. Middle English riden, Old English rīdan, Proto-Germanic rīdaną — and the same word is still standing in Dutch rijden, German reiten, Danish ride and Icelandic ríða. Behind those sits a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to move or stir. English has been riding for as long as there has been English.
Middle English
riden
English, today
ride
Built from
From Middle English riden. From Middle English riden, from Old English rīdan, from Proto-West Germanic rīdan, from Proto-Germanic rīdaną (“to ride”), from Proto-Indo-European Hreydʰ- (“to ride”), from h₃reyH- (“to move”), from h₃er- (“to move, stir”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA