bike

plural bikes

1. abbreviationclippingClipping of bicycle.

   Some of the bikes parked outside Granite Oaks Middle School are the Class Two e-bikes the district is banning.

   2025 December 11, Michelle Bandur, “Rocklin schools put the brakes on class 2 e-bikes due to more crashes, safety concerns”, in KCRA

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   It's called a gravel bike, and seems to combine the advantages of both road and mountain bikes – with a similar ability to lap up the miles on tarmac as a road bike, while still being very capable off-road.

   2017, Chiz Dakin, Cycling in the Peak District […] , Cicerone Press Limited, →ISBN

2. abbreviationclippingClipping of motorbike.
3. Any vehicle sharing some characteristics with a bicycle or motorbike, such as pedal power, a handlebar, or a saddle.

   He warmed up the engine; the bike hovered off the ground despite his weight and the extra equipment.

   2017 July 17, Nell's Tavern, Larry Brasington, page 50

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   In 2017, Amsterdam banned beer bikes from the center of the Dutch city. About 6,000 locals signed a petition, calling on the council to outlaw the vehicles, referring to them as a “terrible phenomenon.”

   2021 May 18, Michael Hearst, Unconventional Vehicles: Forty-Five of the Strangest Cars, Trains, Planes, Submersibles, Dirigibles, and Rockets EVER, Chronicle Books, →ISBN, page 17

4. abbreviationderogatoryellipsisslangEllipsis of village bike.

   Synonyms: slapper, slag

present singular third person bikes · participle present biking · participle past biked · past biked

1. informalintransitiveTo ride a bike.

   I biked so much yesterday that I'm very sore today.

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   In the 1890’s “women were behind the stove,” he relates. But they cycled, too. “And they had difficulty pedalling bicycles with ankle-length skirts. “At the time,” Taylor said, “the most sinful thing a woman could do was to show light between her legs. “The original culotte was designed by a LAW member’s wife. The churches (in the East) termed this bepantsed female activity of biking “sinful bicycling,” he noted.

   1975 April 17, Jack Weatherly, “Dallas or Bust”, in The Courier News, volume 80, number 286, Blytheville, Ark., page 8, column 3

2. informalintransitiveTo travel by bike.

   It was such a nice day I decided to bike to the store, though it's far enough I usually take my car.

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   He saw me catch a trap and leave the house of a drug dealer. That's why he targeted me. He could have easily blown my ass off right then and there for lying, but for some reason he didn't. He just left. I biked back to my plug's spot and told him […]

   2017, Gucci Mane, Neil Martinez-Belkin, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, page 32

3. informaltransitiveTo transport by bicycle.

   I biked them the letters.

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   Frank, a teenager, arrived at his grandfather’s shop to begin work as a butcher’s boy. The job would be to bike parcels of meat around Dronfield and the surrounding countryside between the cities of Sheffield and Chesterfield, right on the county border of Derbyshire and Yorkshire.

   2020 September 1, Tom Lamont, “The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)”, in The Guardian

plural bikes · alternative byke

1. Northern EnglandScotlandcollectiveinformalA hive of bees, or a nest of wasps, hornets, or ants.

   like blue bottle flees in a blink of sunshine, […]A bonny bike there’s o’ them!

   1818 July 25, Jedediah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], Tales of My Landlord, Second Series, […] (The Heart of Mid-Lothian), volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for Archibald Constable and Company, →OCLC

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   he stood for a minute talking to them about their job of gathering cones, and telling them a story about a tree he’d once climbed which had a wasp’s byke in it unbeknown to him.

   1955, Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers, Canongate, published 2012, page 107

   Donald Menzies was well stung all over, both above and below the kilt, by the bees whose bike he was plundering

   1887, James Logie Robinson, 'For puir auld Scotland's sake', prose essays on Scottish literary & rural subjects, by Hugh Haliburton, page 24

2. ScotlandbroadlycollectiveinformalA crowd of people.