Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use wheeze in a sentence

29 example sentences · verb, noun

Wheeze means to breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma. Example: “The new comedy is a wheeze.”

Examples of wheeze by meaning

verbTo breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.

  • If the air smelled even faintly of dog, Lionel coughed, wheezed and sneezed.2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance (Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 443)

verbTo convulse with laughter; to become breathless due to intense laughing.

  • Hearty began to shake and wheeze with laughter, and Millie stood looking at Bindle.1932, Herbert George Jenkins, Bindle Omnibus, page 408
  • He began to wheeze again, and tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks.1973, Robert Boston, A Thorn for the Flesh, page 30
  • Elsie wheezed, laughter swelling her bosom.1988, Elizabeth Oldfield, Beware of Married Men, page 47

verbTo make a sound that resembles the sound of human wheezing.

  • One boy in a black tuxedo and red shoes plays a wheezing accordion like a roadside undertaker.2009, J. P. White, Every Boat Turns South, page 112

nounAn ulterior scheme or plan.

  • Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[V]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC
  • ‘It’s got a file and rope ladder in it and if you was a bit older I’d make you eat them both raw for trying to put such a moth-eaten old wheeze over on me.’1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 90
  • The main point of fuel duty, though, is as a fiscal wheeze: it made up 5% of the tax take in 2010.2011 November 19, “Road rage; High petrol prices hurt, but will not throttle the economy”, in The Economist

nounSomething very humorous or laughable.

  • The new comedy is a wheeze.
  • You think you're going to win? That's a real wheeze!

nounA sound that resembles a human wheezing.

  • At the same time I felt them fall over my brows — time to get a cut — the engine gave a final wheeze and died.2016, Heather Hildenbrand, A Bet Worth Making

More sentences with wheeze

  • Grandpa sat on the front porch, hawking and wheezing, as he packed his pipe with cheap tobacco.From the entry hawk
  • Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease had left her hypoxic and wheezing.From the entry hypoxic
  • You'll never put that wheeze past our eagle-eyed boss.From the entry put past
  • Brobot did not sputter , cough , wheeze , or SPLORK !2020, Martha Brockenbrough, Samantha Berger, Bigfoot Wants a Little Brother, Scholastic Inc., →ISBN. From the entry Brobot
  • In its place is the sad wheeze of the last surviving party balloon slowly, listlessly deflating.2012 August 21, Jason Heller, “The Darkness: Hot Cakes (Music Review)”, in The Onion AV Club. From the entry reform
  • You auscultate her lung sounds and hear scattered wheezing in all lung fields.2010, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons, Emergency Care and Transport of the Sick and Injured, 10th Edition, page 494. From the entry lung fields
  • A cyclic wheezing, groaning noise began as Vin approach the back wall.2010 February 18, "danw" ("DAWootan"), {ASSM} OTEC_204_Years, alt.sex.stories.moderated. From the entry vworp
  • They didn't wheeze from internal motion nor blinkle from synapses throbbing on impulse power.2007, Charlee Jacob, The Indigo People: A Vampire Collection. From the entry blinkle
  • The elevator arrived with a wheeze — one of those old-time jailcell-looking cages.1983, Carolina Quarterly, volumes 36-37, page 87. From the entry jailcell
  • "Ef he ain't de beatenest chil' !" she wheezed; "namin' dat monstrocious dawg after de Jedge !"1938, Chambers's Journal, volume 7, page 271. From the entry monstrocious
  • Heterophonous wheezing sounds like many different musical notes and varies in intensity and pitch across different lung fields.2013, Samuel M. Galvagno, Emergency Pathophysiology: Clinical Applications for Prehospital Care, CRC Press, →ISBN, page 276. From the entry heterophonous
  • Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or—worse—with Strange Faraway Smiles.1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. From the entry wen
  • 'Twas the prudent member gave me the wheeze.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 12: The Cyclops]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part II [Odyssey], page…. From the entry sweat of one's brow
  • Bo John and I twisted our heads around as Miranda braked over to the gravelly shoulder, let the Scout wheeze to a stop.2000, Phil Austin, Naugahide Days: The Lost Island Stories of Thomas Wood Briar, page 109. From the entry clock
  • Irvin Cobb remarked concerning the dull conversation of Hollywood that the phrase coiners preserved silence until they had sold the wheeze themselves.1952, Harold Innis, The Strategy of Culture, University of Toronto Press, Footnote 86. From the entry coiner
  • Just looking at the list made her wheeze, but she studied each item carefully, trying to match the abstract language of symptomology to her very real son’s actual behavior.2021, Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness, Canongate Books (2022), page 146. From the entry symptomology
  • Faced with wheezing, blue-faced patients, they felt they had to do something, and the approach they adopted was polypragmatism, or polypharmacy: they threw the medicine cabinet at the problem.2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, →ISBN. From the entry polypharmacy
  • At the mention of money Mrs Dibble was overcome with great debility, and wheezed, "I don't feel up to talking about money, matters just now, dearie.1950, Norman Lindsay, Dust or Polish?, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 43. From the entry debility

Meaning of wheeze

  1. verb To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.
  2. verb To convulse with laughter; to become breathless due to intense laughing.
  3. verb To make a sound that resembles the sound of human wheezing.

Full definition of wheeze

Questions about wheeze in a sentence

How do you use wheeze in a sentence?
Wheeze is used as a verb and noun. For example: “The new comedy is a wheeze.”
What is a short sentence with wheeze?
“Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze.”
What does wheeze mean?
Wheeze means to breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wheeze (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use wheeze in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/wheeze. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.