spike
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /spaɪk/
rhymes: -aɪk
Forms: form: spikes
form: spiking
form: spiked
form: spiked
Etymology: From Middle English spike, spyke, spik, from Old Norse spík (“spike, sprig”), from Proto-Germanic *spīkō (“stick, splinter, point”), from Proto-Indo-European *spey- (“to be pointed; sharp point, stick”). Cognate with Icelandic spík (“spike”), Swedish spik (“spike, nail”), Dutch spijker (“nail”), Old English spīcing (“spike”), and Latin spīca (“ear of corn”), which may have influenced some senses.
Senses: examples: text: to spike down planks
glosses: To fasten with spikes, or long, large nails.
glosses: To set or furnish with spikes.
glosses: To embed nails into (a tree) so that any attempt to cut it down will damage equipment or injure people.
examples: text: He spiked the story on the “dead” hook and answered his interphone.
ref: 1950, Cyril M. Kornbluth, “The Little Black Bag”, in Astounding Science Fiction, volume 45, number 4:
text: Better known as Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), he spiked his victims on stakes arranged in geometric patterns and accorded each a high or low spear, according to his or her rank.
ref: 1996, Christine Quigley, The Corpse: A History, McFarland, page 144:
glosses: To fix on a spike.
examples: text: Nicolaas, or Nick, as the family called him, wanted to turn professional but an ear injury, sustained during the war, spiked his plans.
ref: 1981, Chris Greyvenstein, The Fighters, page 145:
text: Instead, the "Beaver" declared he would spike the story about Wallis Simpson and make sure his fellow media moguls sat on it too.
ref: 2002 October 14, Jonathan Sale, “Edward VIII news blackout”, in The Guardian:
text: Anyway, on this day I was still struggling with how to use fewer than twenty words to sum up my day in Blackpool in a manner which would not prove too upsetting for my parents, when I learned that I'd got spiked. Again.
ref: 2010, Sharon Marshall, Tabloid Girl, Hachette UK, →ISBN:
text: With two such wildly contradictory versions of why and how NBC News spiked Farrow’s Weinstein story, it’s difficult to determine what objectively occurred.
ref: 2017 October 11, Lloyd Grove, “How NBC ‘Killed’ Ronan Farrow’s Weinstein Exposé”, in Daily Beast:
text: Last October, Bezos halted the Post’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates, spiking the editorial board’s plans to endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the general election.
ref: 2025 June 11, Gregory Svirnovskiy, “Washington Post announces new editor of opinions desk overhauled by Jeff Bezos”, in Politico:
topics: journalism
media
glosses: To discard; to decide not to publish or make public.
examples: text: Traffic accidents spiked in December when there was ice on the roads.
text: 2017, Jennifer S. Holland, For These Monkeys, It’s a Fight for Survival., National Geographic (March 2017)http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/03/macaques-monkeys-indonesia-endangered-pet-trade/
But the bigger threat is that people in Sulawesi have been eating macaque meat for centuries. Today it goes for about two dollars a pound (an adult macaque weighs 18 to 23 pounds), and demand spikes at holidays.
glosses: To increase sharply.
examples: text: She spiked my lemonade with vodka!
text: I asked him what was happening, and if it was all me, and he laughed and held me very close and told me that the Kool-Aid had been ‘spiked’ and that I was just beginning my first LSD experience…
ref: 1968, Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Bantam, published 1997, →ISBN, page 245:
text: She'd sit by the fire, arms crossed, demanding that Ruby spike her tea with a cinder. But Ruby would never give in to her demands, no matter how much her mam begged. There was no alcohol in the house now; Arthur had made sure of that in an effort to get Mary sober.
ref: 2021, Glenda Young, The Miner's Lass:
synonyms: Irish up
glosses: To add alcohol or a drug into a drink, especially if covertly.
examples: text: The water sample to be tested has been spiked with arsenic, antimony, mercury, and lead in quantities commonly found in industrial effluents.
glosses: To add a small amount of one substance to another.
topics: ball-games
games
hobbies
lifestyle
sports
volleyball
synonyms: attack
hit
glosses: To attack from, usually, above the height of the net with the intent to send the ball straight to the floor of the opponent or off the hands of the opposing block.
examples: text: He jumped down, wrenched the hammer from the armourer's hand, and seizing a nail from the bag, in a few moments he had spiked the gun.
ref: 1833, [Frederick Marryat], chapter XVIII, in Peter Simple. […], volume I, London: Saunders and Otley, […], published 1834, →OCLC, page 299:
text: Small skirmishes also took place, and the Afghans managed to seize a pair of mule-guns and force the British to spike and abandon two other precious guns.
ref: 1990, Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game, Folio Society, published 2010, pages 235–6:
topics: government
military
politics
war
glosses: To render (a gun) unusable by driving a metal spike into its touch hole.
examples: text: to spike the football
text: “No one is spiking the football yet,” Mr. Kahl said.
ref: 2022 September 13, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper, quoting Colin Kahl, “The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
topics: American-football
ball-games
football
games
hobbies
lifestyle
sports
glosses: To slam the football to the ground, usually in celebration of scoring a touchdown, or to stop expiring time on the game clock after snapping the ball as to save time for the losing team to attempt to score the tying or winning points.
glosses: To inject a drug with a syringe.
Derived terms: spike a temp
spike a temperature
spike someone's guns
spike up