spoke

UK/spəʊk/US/spoʊk/

nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — spoken sits at #1,536neutral

Other forms: spokes

A spoke is one of the thin rods from hub to rim of a wheel. Break a spoke.

A wire wheel holds its shape by tension, so every spoke is pulling against the rest. One broken spoke pulls a wheel out of true immediately.

Definitions of spoke

1nounspokeOne of the thin rods from hub to rim of a wheel.B2
“He replaced one spoke and trued the wheel by ear.”

spoke is a part.

Where it comes from

Old English spaca, related to Dutch spaak and German Speiche.

Proto-Indo-European
*spey-
Proto-Germanic
*spaikō
Proto-West Germanic
*spaikā
Old English
spāca
Middle English
spoke
English, today
spoke

From Middle English spoke, from Old English spāca, from Proto-West Germanic spaikā, from Proto-Germanic spaikō. Compare Scots spaik (“spoke”), Dutch spaak and spike.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Cycling

Practise this word

spoke in the wild

The radial members of a wagon wheel were made by carving a spoke (from a log) into their finished shape.
Spoke
Eventually, the term spoke was more commonly applied to the finished product of the wheelwright's work than to the materials they used.
Spoke
"Hubbing" involves "the arrangement of a transportation network as a hub-and-spoke model".
Spoke–hub distribution paradigm
A spokeshave is a hand tool used to shape and smooth woods in woodworking jobs such as making cart wheel spokes, chair legs, paddles, bows, and arrows.
Spokeshave
An airline may operate flights from several non-hub (spoke) cities to the hub airport, and passengers traveling between spoke cities connect through the hub.
Airline hub

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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.

Related words

the spāca family

spoken

spoke — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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