Word.ws English Dictionary

spool

/spuːl/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Northern Ireland/spʉl/

spool noun: a reel; a device around which thread, wire or cable is wound, especially a cylinder or spindle.

spool: a reel; a device around which thread, wire or cable is wound, especially a cylinder or spindle
Image: Thamizhpparithi Maari, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

spool (plural spools)

  1. A reel; a device around which thread, wire or cable is wound, especially a cylinder or spindle.
    • If you need to reload film, the cassette can be rewound slightly by turning the hub located on one end of its spool.2011, Rebekah Modrak, Bill Anthes, Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice
  2. One of the rotating assemblies of a gas turbine engine, composed of one or more turbine stages, a shaft, and one or more compressor or fan stages.
    • The high-pressure spool rotates faster than the intermediate- and low-pressure spools, as the high-pressure turbine is driven by superheated combustion gases straight out of the burners, while the high-pressure compressor has to spin very fast to compress air that has already been compressed and...
  3. A temporary storage area for electronic mail, etc.
  4. (West, Yorkshire) A splinter caught in the skin.

Verb

spool (third-person singular simple present spools, present participle spooling, simple past and past participle spooled)

  1. To wind on a spool or spools.
  2. To send files to a device or a program (a spooler or a daemon that puts them in a queue for processing at a later time).

Noun (2)

spool (plural spools)

  1. A small swimming pool that can be used also as a spa.

spool meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Kannada

spool in Hindi

spindle
अटेरन aṭeran

spool in Tamil

கண்டு, நூல் சுற்றிவைக்கும் வட்டு, கண்டி, சக்கரம், நூற்கட்டை, சுருள்

spool in Bengali

নলি, রিল

spool in Kannada

ಕಂಡಿಕೆ
More languagesFewer languages
spool in Tagalog
ulak, mag-ikid, kidkiran
spool in Arabic
بَكَرَة bakara
spool in Malay
kekili
spool in Indonesian
kumparan
spool in Thai
ม้วน múuan, กระสวย grà-sǔai
spool in Vietnamese
suốt
spool in Myanmar
တညင်းလုံး ta.nyang:lum:, ဘီးလုံး bhi:lum:

Examples of spool in a sentence

  • I wound up the spool of rope.
  • The large rotational inertia of the heavy compressor and turbine rotors makes the engine slow to spool up from idle.
  • The wire was prewound around the spools.

All 17 example sentences with spool

Forms of spool

Noun
pluralspools
Verb
third-person singular presentspools
present participlespooling
past participlespooled
pastspooled

Plural of spool: spools

Origin of spool

From Middle English spole (possibly via Old Northern French spole, espole), from Middle Dutch spoele, from Old Dutch *spōla, *spuola, from Proto-Germanic *spōlǭ (“spool”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pel- (“to cleave, split”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Spoule (“spool”), Dutch spoel (“spool”), German Spule (“spool”), Swedish spole (“spool”), Icelandic spóla (“spool; reel”). The aviation usage is based on the visual similarity of one of the spools of a turbine engine to a spool used for thread (especially in cross-section). See also spill.

From blend of spa + pool.

Words formed from spool

Phrases with spool

Words that rhyme with spool

42 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about spool

What does spool mean?
Spool means a reel; a device around which thread, wire or cable is wound, especially a cylinder or spindle.
What is spool in Hindi?
Spool in Hindi is अटेरन (aṭeran). See Spool meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is spool?
Spool can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce spool?
Spool is pronounced /spuːl/.
What is the plural of spool?
The plural of spool is spools.

Words near spool in the dictionary

  1. spooky PAC
  2. spooky PACs
  3. spooky season
  4. spooky seasons
  5. spooky-ass
  6. spool
  7. spool brush
  8. spool brushes
  9. spool cannon
  10. spool cannons
  11. spool down

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spool (page history and authors); spool (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); spool (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); spool (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-spool.ogg.

Cite this entry: “spool.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spool. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.