Around here, we've been writing about bikes with ridiculously large tires since Fat-bike.com first appeared in 2011. Long before that, riders in Texas, Alaska, New Mexico and other places were experimenting with ways to float a bicycle over snow, sand and terrain where an ordinary mountain bike simply dug itself a hole.

Those bikes eventually got a name: fat bikes. Around here, we've long preferred to write it as fat-bikes, and lately that little dash has started to feel more important than we ever expected.

That's because the word fatbike has increasingly come to mean something very different.

Our definition is pretty simple. A fat-bike is a bicycle built around 26-inch or 27.5-inch wheels with tires roughly 3.8 inches wide or wider.

These are the descendants of bikes developed for riding snow, sand and other soft terrain. Think Wildfire, Surly Pugsley, Salsa Mukluk, Fatback, Tatanka, Beargrease, Ice Cream Truck, Wednesday and the a ton of other bikes that followed.

Electric assist doesn't necessarily disqualify a bike from that lineage, either. Put a motor on a proper full-size fat-bike and you've got an e-fat-bike. It's still part of the same family because the defining characteristic isn't simply that the tire happens to be fat. It's the platform, the geometry and the riding purpose that grew out of the original snow and sand bikes.

Fat-bikes didn't suddenly appear when somebody bolted a hub motor to a small bicycle with four-inch tires. The history goes back decades.

Alaskan riders experimented with wider wheels and tires to make bicycles work in snow. In the Southwest, Ray Molina worked on wide wheels and tires for riding sand. Mark Gronewald of Wildfire Designs was building purpose-built wide-tire bicycles in Alaska around the turn of the century (Wow! that used to mean near 1900!) and was using the name “Fat Bike” by 2001.

Then Surly helped blow the doors open. Development of the Large Marge rim began in 2003, the Pugsley was shown at Interbike in 2004, and production frames became available in 2005.

The Pugsley wasn't designed to look like a motorcycle. It was designed to take a bicycle somewhere a normal mountain bike couldn't go: snow, sand, mud, beaches, frozen rivers and places where there wasn't much of a trail at all.

That's the DNA of the fat-bike.

Fast-forward twenty years and search for “fatbike” in many parts of the world today and you may see something entirely different.

Instead of a full-size snow, sand or expedition bike, you're likely to find a machine with 20-inch wheels, four-inch tires, a long bench seat, a low BMX, or motorcycle-inspired frame, a big battery, electric assist and a throttle. Many can also be modified for substantially more speed than a typical pedal-assist bicycle.

In the Netherlands, these machines have become enormously popular with young riders. They've also become enough of a traffic and safety issue that the Dutch government is working on specific policies aimed at “fatbikes.”

That's how far the word has drifted. Government officials are even wrestling with how to legally define a fatbike without accidentally sweeping conventional electric bicycles into the same category.

Maybe that tells us something. Maybe we need better words.

Fat-bike.com is going to use the dash.

From here forward, when we write fat-bike, we mean a full-size bicycle using 26-inch or 27.5-inch wheels and approximately 3.8-inch or wider tires, descended from the snow, sand and expedition bikes that created this category.

An e-fat-bike is the same basic platform with electric assist.

When we write fatbike, without the dash, we mean the newer compact, typically 20-inch, wide-tire electric machines with BMX, minibike or moped-like geometry that have adopted the name.

Is that the official dictionary definition? Nope. At least not yet.

Most dictionaries still treat “fat bike” “tat-bike” and “fatbike” as alternate spellings for the same thing, and plenty of bicycle companies, publications and riders do the same. For that matter, dig deeply enough into the Fat-bike.com archives and you'll catch us writing it more than one way over the years.

Language is messy, but language also changes. Right now we've got two increasingly different types of vehicles sharing the same name, and we think they're different enough to deserve different words.

Conveniently, we've already got a punctuation mark ready to do the job!

Because when somebody sees a headline saying “Fatbikes are causing problems,” that headline increasingly isn't talking about the bicycle somebody is riding across a frozen Wisconsin lake at 6 psi. It isn't talking about someone pedaling a Pugsley down a beach or an Arrowhead 135 racer riding through the night at 20 below zero.

It may be talking about a kid riding a modified electric minibike through Amsterdam, or your neighborhood, at speeds well beyond what most people associate with a bicycle.

Those are different machines with different uses, different cultures and, in many cases, different problems. Lumping them together isn't particularly useful for either group.

We're not opposed to electric bikes, and we're not saying there's anything inherently wrong with a small-wheeled electric bike with big tires. We're saying it isn't what the cycling world meant when it created the fat-bike category.

That's an important distinction, especially as the word “fatbike” increasingly appears in stories about regulation, safety, speed and youth riders.

There is also something wonderfully appropriate about all of this.

For years we've often said the site's name out loud as Fat Dash Bike Dot Com. It was mostly a way to clearly tell someone about the website name but maybe that was more important than we realized.

That little dash now gives us a way to connect the site to a category of bicycles and a community that existed long before today's electric fatbike boom. It gives us a simple way to say that these are related-looking machines, but they aren't necessarily the same thing.

So we're keeping the dash, and we're going to use it deliberately.

A Pugsley is a fat-bike. A Mukluk is a fat-bike. A Beargrease is a fat-bike. A full-size electric bike built around that same platform is an e-fat-bike.

That 20-inch electric minibike with a bench seat? That's a fatbike.

No dash.

Will the rest of the world adopt our terminology? Who knows. But somebody has to start.

Save the Dash. Ride fat.

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