Other forms: unicycles
A unicycle is a cycle with a single wheel and no handlebars. Ride a unicycle, learn the unicycle, a circus unicycle.
The pedals drive the wheel directly, so there is no freewheel and no brake — balance and speed are controlled by pedalling. Learning takes most people ten to twenty hours. It probably developed from the penny-farthing, whose rear wheel became unnecessary when the front one was driven. Note unicyclist; and that mountain unicycling is a real and surprisingly popular sport.
1noununicycleA cycle with a single wheel and no handlebars.
“The unicycle takes about fifteen hours to learn.”
unicycle is a cycle.
Uni-, one, plus cycle, from Greek kyklos, a wheel. Bicycle and tricycle were coined the same way a few years earlier.
Proto-Indo-European
*kʷel-
Middle English
cicle
English
cycle
English, today
unicycle
From uni + cycle. cycle comes from Middle English cicle. From Middle English cicle (“fixed length period of years”), from Latin cyclus, from Ancient Greek κύκλος (“circle”), from Proto-Hellenic kúklos, kʷókʷlos, from Proto-Indo-European kʷékʷlos (“circle, wheel”). a doublet of chakra and chakram and charkha and chukker and cyclus and kike and wheel (see there for more).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA