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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

spire.

The stalk or stem of a plant.

5 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/spaɪə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ɚ/General-American
  1. The stalk or stem of a plant.

    archaic
  2. A young shoot of a plant; a spear.

  3. Any of various tall grasses, rushes, or sedges, such as the marram, the reed canary-grass, etc.

  4. A sharp or tapering point.

  5. A tapering structure built on a roof or tower, especially as one of the central architectural features of a church or cathedral roof.

    The spire of the church rose high above the town.
  6. The top, or uppermost point, of anything; the summit.

  7. A tube or fuse for communicating fire to the charge in blasting.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English spire, spyre, spier, spir, from Old English spīr, from Proto-Germanic *spīrō, *spīrǭ (“peak; point; tip; stalk”). Cognate with Dutch spier, German Low German Spier, German Spier, Spiere, Danish spir, Norwegian spir and spire, Swedish spira, Icelandic spíra.

verb/spaɪə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ɚ/General-American
  1. to sprout, to send forth the early shoots of growth; to germinate.

  2. To grow upwards rather than develop horizontally.

  3. To furnish with a spire.

    transitive
Where this word comes from

From Middle English spire, spyre, spier, spir, from Old English spīr, from Proto-Germanic *spīrō, *spīrǭ (“peak; point; tip; stalk”). Cognate with Dutch spier, German Low German Spier, German Spier, Spiere, Danish spir, Norwegian spir and spire, Swedish spira, Icelandic spíra.

verb/spaɪə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ɚ/General-American
  1. To breathe.

    intransitive · obsolete
Where this word comes from

From Old French spirer, and its source, Latin spīrō (“to breathe”).

noun/spaɪə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ə/Received-Pronunciation/ˈspaɪ.ɚ/General-American
  1. One of the sinuous foldings of a serpent or other reptile; a coil.

  2. A spiral.

  3. The part of a spiral generated in one revolution of the straight line about the pole.

Where this word comes from

From Middle French spire.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.