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hike

nounverbinterjectioncommon in dialogue

  • //haɪk//

A long walk, usually for pleasure or exercise.

noun

  1. 1

    A long walk, usually for pleasure or exercise.

    Well, if it gave him so much pleasure to find the nest, he is welcome to the eggs. I can hunt another grass tuft, lay another set, and rear my brood in peace while he goes "hiking" after eggs at Flathead.

    From here, you can pick up the asphalt bike path and take a hike across the meadow.

    The hike along the trolley line from Smedley to Thompson Park is a wild and wooly excursion that brings you across train tracks, through dry creek beds, past ferns and wild roses and more.

    The hike through the city of Napa's Alston Park is a great introduction to the Napa Valley.

  2. 2

    An abrupt increase.

    The tenants were not happy with the rent hike.

    It was on this campus last winter that gay people stood in the vanguard of protests against a tuition hike proposed and passed during the city's fiscal crisis.

    Those who are part of the consortium are protected from the current energy price hikes because they were tied into a fixed rate deal set almost a year ago (and continuing into most of next year).

    With soaring inflation and the shadow of recession hanging over the United States, the Federal Reserve announced a 0.75 percentage-point increase in interest rates on Wednesday – the largest hike since 1994.

  3. 3

    The snap of the ball to start a play.

  4. 4

    A sharp upward tug to raise something.

    She gave a cute hike of her skirt as she spun and almost sauntered down the stairs.

Etymology

From English dialectal hyke (“to walk vigorously”), probably a Northern form of hitch, from Middle English hytchen, hichen, icchen (“to move, jerk, stir”). Cognate with Scots hyke (“to move with a jerk”), dialectal German hicken (“to hobble, walk with a limp”), Danish hinke (“to hop”).

verb

  1. 1

    To take a long walk (on something) for pleasure or exercise.

    Don't forget to bring the map when we go hiking tomorrow.

    When Dick Hudson hiked the trail between 1966 and 1970, he met so few hikers that he can still recall nearly all of them.

  2. 2

    To unfairly or suddenly raise a price.

  3. 3

    To snap the ball to start a play.

  4. 4

    To lean out to the windward side of a sailboat in order to counterbalance the effects of the wind on the sails.

  5. 5

    To pull up or tug upwards sharply.

    She hiked her skirt up.

interjection

  1. 1

    Let's go; get moving. A command to a dog sled team, given by a musher.

Forms

plural
hikes
past tense
hiked
past participle
hiked
present participle
hiking
third person singular
hikes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).