Word.ws English Dictionary

great wheel

great wheel noun: a type of spinning wheel with a large drive wheel, turned by hand rather than a treadle.

great wheel: a type of spinning wheel with a large drive wheel, turned by hand rather than a treadle
Image: Sabine Baring-Gould, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

great wheel (plural great wheels)

  1. A type of spinning wheel with a large drive wheel, turned by hand rather than a treadle.
    • Over the room in the inn where he and Boswell sat "a girl was spinning wool with a great wheel, and singing an Erse song."1890, George Birkbeck Norman Hill, Footsteps of Dr. Johnson, page 135
    • The great wheel does require better fiber preparation than is necessary with a treadle wheel. This is partly because you use only one hand to control the drawing out of the yarn, and also because you cannot draw against the spindle.1987, Paula Simmons, Spinning and weaving with wool, published 1977, →ISBN, page 114

Forms of great wheel

pluralgreat wheels

Questions about great wheel

What does great wheel mean?
Great wheel means a type of spinning wheel with a large drive wheel, turned by hand rather than a treadle.
What part of speech is great wheel?
Great wheel is a noun.
What is the plural of great wheel?
The plural of great wheel is great wheels.

Words near great wheel in the dictionary

  1. Great Welnetham
  2. Great Wen
  3. Great Western
  4. great whale
  5. great whales
  6. great wheel
  7. great wheels
  8. Great Whelnetham
  9. great white
  10. Great White Brotherhood
  11. great white egret

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: great wheel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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