Word.ws English Dictionary

wheel round

wheel round is the alternative form of wheel around.

Meaning of wheel around

Verb

wheel around (third-person singular simple present wheels around, present participle wheeling around, simple past and past participle wheeled around)

  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...
  2. (figuratively, intransitive) To change direction quickly, turn, pivot, whirl around.
    • 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
    Synonyms:
    wheel about
  3. (figuratively, transitive) To cause to change direction quickly, turn.
    • 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...1834, “Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara” in The Quarterly Review, London: John Murray, Volume 52, August and November, 1834, p. 387
  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.
    • 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.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

Forms of wheel round

third-person singular presentwheels round
present participlewheeling round
past participlewheeled round
pastwheeled round

Questions about wheel round

What is wheel round the alternative form of?
Wheel round is the alternative form of wheel around.

Words near wheel round in the dictionary

  1. wheel pits
  2. wheel plough
  3. wheel ploughs
  4. wheel press
  5. wheel presses
  6. wheel round
  7. wheel shop
  8. wheel shops
  9. wheel slide
  10. wheel spider
  11. wheel spiders

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wheel round (page history and authors); wheel around (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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Cite this entry: “wheel round.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wheel_round. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.