Dictionary

wheel around en · VERB

Meanings

1. (transitive) To transport someone or something to various locations by pushing a wheeled transporter such as a wheelchair or wheelbarrow.
   • […] meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. 1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter 9, in Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001:
2. (figuratively, intransitive) To change direction quickly, turn, pivot, whirl around.
   • At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam’s ear. He wheeled around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine. 1908, O. Henry, “Squaring the Circle”, in The Voice of the City, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, published 1914, pages 130–131:
   • The tide was out, and we drew up amid the strong bracing smell of seaweed, with gulls screeching, wheeling around, and gliding on the wind. 1947 January and February, O. S. Nock, “"The Aberdonian" in Wartime”, in Railway Magazine, page 8:
   • The pony made a moment’s pause; but, as if it occurred to him that to stop when he was required might be to establish an inconvenient and dangerous precedent, he immediately started off again, rattled at a fast trot to the street corner, wheeled round, came back, and then stopped of his own accord. 1840 April – 1841 November, Charles Dickens, “Chapter the Sixty-fifth”, in The Old Curiosity Shop. A Tale. […], volume II, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1841, →OCLC:
3. (figuratively, transitive) To cause to change direction quickly, turn.
   • As soon as the crossing was effected, the general’s face suddenly took on an expression of deliberation and seriousness; he wheeled his horse around, and at full gallop rode across the wide forest-surrounded field which spread before us. 1887, Leo Tolstoy, “The Invaders”, in Nathan Haskell Dole, transl., The Invaders and Other Stories, New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co., published 1853, pages 29–30:
   • 1834, “Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara” in The Quarterly Review, London: John Murray, Volume 52, August and November, 1834, p. 387, The river of Cabool was crossed on a raft supported on inflated skins […] Its rapidity, formed into eddies, wheeled them round, and they had the agreeable satisfaction of being told that, if carried some way down, there was a whirlpool round which, if once enclosed in its circle, they might revolve, in hunger and giddiness, for a whole day.
4. (intransitive) In dancing, when a couple, holding hands, turns around 180 degrees, with the left hand dancer moving backward and the right hand dancer moving forward.
   • 1950, Lee Owens and Viola Ruth, Advanced Square Dance Figures of the West and Southwest, Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, “The Do-Si-Do Shuffle,” p. 108, When in Opposites’ positions, the two Head Couples dance a Right and Left Through to their home place where they wheel around to face the center.

Forms

Synonyms

wheel about