noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of axle
before 900; Middle English axel, Old English eaxl shoulder, crossbeam (in eaxle-gespann ); cognate with Old Frisian ax ( e ) le, Old Saxon ahsla, Old High German ahsala shoulder ( German Achsel ), Old Norse ǫxl, Latin āla (< derivative of *akslā )
Explanation
An axle is a rod around which a wheel moves or rotates. The front wheels of your car sit on an axle, turning around it as the car moves. Any kind of vehicle with wheels uses some kind of axle for those wheels to rotate on. Trucks, buses, and cars have axles, and so do lawnmowers and wagons and even bicycles. The original, Middle English word for axle was axle-tree, which came from a combination of the Old Norse word öxull and the Old English eax, both of which mean "axis," or "line around which a body rotates."
Vocabulary lists containing axle
Automobiles
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Commonly Misspelled Words, List 1
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Force and Motion (Mechanics) - Middle School
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The Luce is the first Ferrari with five seats—an option ruled out by the axle in its traditional powertrain configurations.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 25, 2026
Foiling the visual expectations of a lifetime, the four-door’s glass roof joins the car’s sloping rear deck just over the rear axle, omitting a transparent panel of any kind.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 25, 2026
An obvious solution to that was to recover from the front axle as well as the rear.
From BBC • Mar. 10, 2026
F1 decided not to allow teams to recover energy from the front axle, only the rear.
From BBC • Jan. 26, 2026
Then I drilled a hole in the middle of the two big circles and put a little post in there, like the axle of a wheel.
From "The (Mostly) True Story of Cleopatra's Needle" by Dan Gutman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
