Throttlefolio

Stage 1 of 4

The bike

What the words mean. Bike types, the styles people argue about, and the engine terms on the advert.

Four motorcycles of different shapes standing side by side in a workshop, their outlines clear against a pale wall.

Motorcycling runs on vocabulary, and almost none of it is written down anywhere official. Two of these questions have a hard answer: cc is defined in UK law, and the four-stroke cycle is named after something you can count. The rest are style names that riders and builders settled between themselves, so these pages say who uses a term and what it usually describes, and they stop short of pretending there's a standard behind it. Nothing here asks you to buy anything.

The reading, in order

And after that

The stage that follows this one is your bike: The machine in your own garage: how to photograph it, and how each style of bike gets drawn.

Written by Craig Fearn, Throttlefolio. Last updated .