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spire

UK/spaɪə/US/ˈspaɪ.ɚ/
nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,033 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: spires

A spire is the tall pointed top of a church tower. The church spire, a slender spire, seen by its spire.

It has no use beyond height and the eye, which is exactly its purpose: a spire made the church visible across the parish. Salisbury's is the tallest in Britain and leans measurably from the weight.

Antony McCallum: Who is the uploader, photographer, full copyright owner and proprietor of WyrdLight.com · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of spire

  1. 1nounspireThe tall pointed top of a church tower.C2

    “Lightning struck the spire of the old church and knocked off the weathervane.”

spire is a structure.

Where it comes from

Old English spir means a stalk or shoot, from a Germanic root meaning a point.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *spey-

  2. Proto-Germanic

    *spīrō

  3. Old English

    spīr

  4. Middle English

    spire

  5. English, today

    spire

Built from

  • *spīrǭ · Proto-Germanic — peak; point; tip; stalk

From Middle English spire, spyre, spier, spir, from Old English spīr, from Proto-Germanic spīrō, spīrǭ (“peak; point; tip; stalk”). Cognate with Dutch spier, German Low German Spier, German Spier, Spiere, Danish spir, Norwegian spir and spire, Swedish spira, Icelandic spíra.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Buildings & Architecture

Practise this word

spire in the wild

  • A spire is a tall, slender, pointed structure on top of a roof of a building or tower, especially at the summit of church steeples.

    Spire

  • A spire may have a square, circular, or polygonal plan, with a roughly conical or pyramidal shape.

    Spire

  • A spire is a part of the coiled shell of molluscs.

    Spire (mollusc)

  • The spire consists of all of the whorls except for the body whorl.

    Spire (mollusc)

  • Popular with mountaineers, the spire has numerous challenging cliffs.

    Symmetry Spire

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.