vélocipède

Vélocipède is a French compound from Latin velox (fast, swift) and pes, pedis (foot). The word means 'fast foot.' It was coined in 1818 by the French press to describe Karl von Drais's Laufmaschine — a two-wheeled wooden vehicle propelled by pushing one's feet against the ground. Drais, a German baron, had invented it the year before in Mannheim. The French gave it a better name.

For the next fifty years, velocipede covered every stage of bicycle evolution. The Drais machine (no pedals, 1817), the Macmillan bicycle (treadle-driven, 1839), the boneshaker (pedals on the front wheel, 1863), and the high-wheeler or penny-farthing (1870s) were all called velocipedes. The word was a genus, not a species. In 1868, Paris saw its first velocipede races. In 1869, New York opened velocipede riding academies. The word was everywhere.

Then bicycle killed it. The word bicycle, from French bi- (two) and Greek kyklos (wheel), was more specific and shorter. By the 1880s, the chain-driven safety bicycle had standardized the design, and bicycle had standardized the name. Velocipede retreated to legal and archival usage. French traffic law still uses vélocipède as the formal term for any human-powered wheeled vehicle. In everyday speech, it is vélo.

The word left descendants. In French, vélo is the standard informal word for a bicycle — a clipping of vélocipède. In Russian, velosiped is the standard word, neither formal nor informal. In Portuguese, velocípede was the word until bicicleta replaced it in the twentieth century. The word that named the thing first lost to the word that described it better. Speed lost to geometry.