cycle
Pluralcycles
Pluralcycles
- 1A series of events or stages that happen in a fixed order and then repeat from the start.
The economy moves through a cycle of growth, slowdown, and recovery.
Nitrogen passes through a natural cycle as it moves between soil, plants, and air.
UsageOften names what repeats: a cycle of violence, the news cycle. To stop something from coming back is to break the cycle.
- 2To ride a bicycle or other similar vehicle, such as a tricycle or unicycle.
Thousands of commuters cycle into downtown every weekday morning.
He is cycling across the state this week to raise money for the hospital.
UsageFor the activity, say go cycling; for a trip, cycle to or through a place. A distance follows directly: cycled ten miles.
- 3The period of time, or stretch of space, taken up by one complete round of a repeating process, from its start until it begins again.
Each cycle of the tide takes roughly twelve and a half hours.
The company's billing cycle runs from the first to the last day of the month.
Note
The sense nearest the word's first English meaning: Middle English cicle meant a fixed period of years. Edmund Burke's Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, written in 1795, speaks of "the last bad cycle of twenty years."
- 4To pass through a recurring series of stages, or to cause something to pass through a recurring series of stages.
Markets cycle between optimism and fear as conditions shift.
Engineers cycled the engine through thousands of test runs before approving the design.
UsageOften followed by through a series, between two states, or from one stage to the next.
- 5A program on a washing machine, dishwasher, or similar appliance that carries out a set sequence of operations.
She set the washer to the delicate cycle before leaving for work.
The dishwasher beeps twice when the cycle finishes.
UsageThings are washed on a cycle (on the delicate cycle), and you run or start a cycle.
- 6A pedal-driven vehicle, such as a bicycle, tricycle, or unicycle, or a motor vehicle with two or three wheels; often used before another noun, as in cycle lane.
Commuters parked their cycles in the racks outside the station.
He bought a secondhand cycle and rode it across the city all summer.
UsageIn everyday talk, bike is much more common; cycle sounds more formal or technical.
- 7A group of poems, songs, plays, novels, or other works on a shared theme or story that together form a connected whole.
Schubert's song cycle traces a heartbroken wanderer's journey through a winter landscape.
The medieval mystery plays formed a cycle performed over several days.
UsageOften in song cycle, or a cycle of poems, plays, or stories.
- 8A scheduled period of weeks or months during which a performance-enhancing substance or supplement is taken, followed by a period when it is not taken or the dose is lower.
He ran an eight-week cycle of creatine before tapering off.
Bodybuilders often plan their cycles around competition dates.
UsageCommon phrases: on cycle while taking it, off cycle during the break or lower dose.
Similarcourse
Note
Gym and bodybuilding usage built on an on-and-off rhythm. An athlete who is off cycle is in the rest or lower-dose phase, when a loss of size or strength may show. The term is strongly associated with anabolic steroids, and by extension it covers supplements such as creatine.
Less common meanings
- 9A single complete rotation, whether of a wheel, a motor shaft, or any other rotating object.
The old turntable makes one full cycle about every two seconds.
The meter counts a single cycle each time the fan blade sweeps all the way around.
Similarrevolution, rotation, turn
- 10To turn the power to a device off and then back on.
The technician cycled the power to clear the fault.
Try to cycle the breaker before calling an electrician.
UsageThe object can be the power or the device itself: cycle the power, or cycle the router.
Similarreset
Note
An electronics verb for a standard troubleshooting move: cutting the power and restoring it so that a fault clears or a controller starts over. It is a narrow, technical use of the general "repeat" verb, and doing it when it is not needed is something technicians advise against.
- 11A unit of frequency equal to one complete repetition per second; the same as a hertz.
Before the 1960s, American radio dials were marked in kilocycles rather than kilohertz.
American homes ran on 60-cycle current, which engineers today would call 60 hertz.
UsageAn older term; today hertz is used. Per second is often left unsaid: 50 cycles, 60-cycle current.
Similarhertz
Note
In 1958 the Railway Magazine describes high-voltage alternating current "at a frequency of 50 cycles," meaning fifty per second. Hertz names exactly the same unit, so the two can be converted one for one, and kilocycle corresponds to kilohertz.
- 12A baseball achievement in which one player hits a single, a double, a triple, and a home run during the same game.
The rookie hit for the cycle on Tuesday, capping the night with a triple in the eighth inning.
After his triple in the eighth inning, the rookie needed only a home run to hit for the cycle.
UsageThe usual phrase is hit for the cycle.
Note
A rare batting feat: one hit of every kind in a single game. The four hits may come in any order. When they arrive in ascending order, from single through home run, the feat is called a natural cycle.
- 13A closed walk or path in a graph that starts and ends at the same vertex, with or without repeated vertices allowed depending on the definition.
The graph contains a cycle of length four through these vertices.
Trees are exactly the connected graphs that contain no cycles.
Similarcircuit
Note
Graph theorists do not all draw the line in the same place. In the looser usage, any closed walk counts. In the stricter one, no edge may repeat and no vertex may repeat except where the path begins and ends; writers who need the distinction call this a simple cycle. On the stricter reading, a connected graph with no cycles at all is a tree.
- 14An extremely long span of time, comparable to an entire age.
Thro' the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day: / Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
1835, Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall”Note
Tennyson made this sense memorable in "Locksley Hall": "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." A Chinese calendar cycle is sixty years, but Tennyson seems to have meant a vast, vague age, and in the poem it counts for less. In modern use the sense is chiefly literary, suited to elevated prose rather than everyday talk.
- 15One takeoff and landing of an aircraft, counted as a measure of wear because each one stresses the airframe.
- 16An orderly list of events or observances for a given period; a calendar.
- 17A ring of plant parts, or a complete spiral series from one part up to, but excluding, the next part directly above it.
- 18To maintain possession of the puck in the offensive zone by passing it in a loop along the boards, from behind the goal up the side and back.
- 19A single discharge of a taser.
- 20An imaginary circle or orbit in the heavens; one of the celestial spheres of ancient astronomy.
With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb
1667, John Milton, Paradise Lost - 21In algebraic topology, a chain whose boundary is zero.
Showing meanings only.
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Origin
The root is Proto-Indo-European *kʷékʷlos ("circle, wheel"), which came through Proto-Hellenic to Ancient Greek κύκλος (kúklos, "circle"), then to Late Latin cyclus and Middle English cicle ("a fixed period of years"). Chakra and wheel are doublets of it.