Motorbike Types, Styles and Engine Terms, Answered

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.

Where the style names came from

Most of the names began as workshop slang for something a rider did to a bike. A bob-job, later shortened to bobber, was a road bike stripped to look like the bare racers of the 1930s. A chopper is a bike whose frame has been cut and welded, and the word did not appear in print until the mid-1960s. Scrambles was the British name for racing off-road, and the first known scramble was run at Camberley in Surrey in 1924. The streetfighter grew out of sports bikes that lost their fairings, often after a crash, and was first drawn in a British bike magazine in 1983. None of these names is a legal category, so the pages that follow describe what riders mean by each one.

Where the law does step in

The law cares about what has been done to a bike, not what it is called. Changing the frame is the line to know: GOV.UK says lengthening, shortening or widening the frame of a motorcycle is a structural modification, and DVLA must be told. In England, Wales and Scotland every motorcycle also needs wings or similar fittings to catch the mud and water its wheels throw up, under regulation 63 of the Construction and Use Regulations. Both matter to anyone building a bobber or a chopper, and those two question pages go into it.

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 looks as art.

Written by Craig Fearn, Throttlefolio. Last updated 28 September 2026.

The bike

Where the style names came from

Where the law does step in

The reading, in order

And after that

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