The etymology of "tire" is that the word is a short form of "attire", and that a wheel with a tire is a dressed wheel.
The spelling tyre does not appear until the 1840s when the English began shrink fitting railway car wheels with malleable iron. Nevertheless, traditional publishers continued using tire. The Times newspaper in Britain was still using tire as late as 1905. The spelling tyre began to be commonly used in the 19th century for pneumatic tires in the UK. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica states that "[t]he spelling 'tyre' is not now accepted by the best English authorities, and is unrecognized in the US", while Fowler's Modern English Usage of 1926 says that "there is nothing to be said for 'tyre', which is etymologically wrong, as well as needlessly divergent from our own [sc. British] older & the present American usage". However, over the course of the 20th century, tyre became established as the standard British spelling.
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