Plural of axletree; the bars or shafts on which wheels of a vehicle spin and rotate.
From Old English 'axl' (axis) + 'tree' (wood beam). The axle itself comes from Proto-Indo-European 'ak-' meaning 'sharp' or 'point,' while 'tree' originally meant any wooden beam or rod used structurally.
Medieval carriage makers called the spinning shaft an 'axletree' because they thought of it as the tree-like wood core around which wheels grew—a poetic name for a crucial piece of engineering that changed human transportation.
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