Word.ws English Dictionary

ghost bike

ghost bike noun: a bicycle painted white and set up as a roadside memorial to indicate where a cyclist was killed by traffic.

ghost bike: a bicycle painted white and set up as a roadside memorial to indicate where a cyclist was killed by...
Image: Bukk, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

ghost bike (plural ghost bikes)

  1. A bicycle painted white and set up as a roadside memorial to indicate where a cyclist was killed by traffic.
    • Often painted entirely in white and locked to a fixed object as close to the accident site as possible, ghost bikes aim to act as both a memorial –they feature the name of the dead rider and other details, whether on a sign or painted to the frame – and a cautionary reminder for cyclists and...2011 November 10, Peter Walker, Vicky Lane, “Ghost bikes: memorials to road victims blamed for putting people off cycling”, in The Guardian
    Synonyms:
    ghost bicycle

Synonyms of ghost bike

Forms of ghost bike

pluralghost bikes

Origin of ghost bike

First use appears c. 2003 in the US.

Questions about ghost bike

What does ghost bike mean?
Ghost bike means a bicycle painted white and set up as a roadside memorial to indicate where a cyclist was killed by traffic.
What part of speech is ghost bike?
Ghost bike is a noun.
What is the plural of ghost bike?
The plural of ghost bike is ghost bikes.

Words near ghost bike in the dictionary

  1. ghost bands
  2. ghost bat
  3. ghost bats
  4. ghost bicycle
  5. ghost bicycles
  6. ghost bike
  7. ghost bikes
  8. ghost brand
  9. ghost brands
  10. ghost bullet
  11. ghost bullets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ghost bike (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ghost bike.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ghost_bike. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.