spire [OE] Old English spīr was a ‘tall slender stem of a plant’, related to German Spier ‘tip of a blade of grass’. The word came to be used from the late 16th century for a slender structure such as a spire of rock or a church spire. Dreaming spires comes from Matthew Arnold, writing of Oxford in Thyrsis (1865) ‘And that sweet city with her dreaming spires…Lovely all times she lies, lovely to-night’. Spire has no connection with spiral [M16th] which comes from Latin spira ‘coil’.