Word.ws English Dictionary

wheelie bin

wheelie bin noun: a wheeled outdoor rubbish bin designed for easy movement.

wheelie bin: a wheeled outdoor rubbish bin designed for easy movement
Image: CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

wheelie bin (plural wheelie bins)

  1. (Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, UK) A wheeled outdoor rubbish bin designed for easy movement.
    • Instead we switched from dustbins to wheelie bins which required equally significant investment in new bins and refuse vehicles. However because the wheelie bins were larger and easier to collect they actually increased the volume of unsegregated waste.1999, David Rudlin, Nicholas Falk, Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood, UK: Elsevier, page 95
    • You see the occasional frustrated libidinous lunatics walking along Johnson Street kickboxing at the wheelie bins and spreading the contents all over the road.2005, John Chalmers, Byron Bay Taxis And Lunacies, page 85

Examples of wheelie bin in a sentence

  • It collects waste materials, including paper, glass, plastics and metals, in the blue-topped recycling wheelie bins from more than two million households each week.2009, James Kirby, Rod Myer, Richard Pratt: One Out of the Box: The Secrets of an Australian Billionaire, page 49:
  • It can be difficult when people leave their wheelie bins out on the pavement and she has to go into the road to get past.2011, Peter Beresford, Jennie Fleming, Catherone Bewley, Michael Glynn, Suzy Croft, Supporting People: Towards a Person-Centred Approach...
  • The next Monday afternoon Daryl hooked his wheelie bin onto the ute′s tow bar.2012, John Bryant, Great Australian Ute Stories, HarperCollins Australia, unnumbered page:

Synonyms of wheelie bin

Forms of wheelie bin

pluralwheelie bins
alternative formwheelie-bin

Origin of wheelie bin

From wheelie (“presumably a variant of wheely (wheeled)”) + bin.

Questions about wheelie bin

What does wheelie bin mean?
Wheelie bin means a wheeled outdoor rubbish bin designed for easy movement.
How do you use wheelie bin in a sentence?
It collects waste materials, including paper, glass, plastics and metals, in the blue-topped recycling wheelie bins from more than two million households each week.
What part of speech is wheelie bin?
Wheelie bin is a noun.
What is the plural of wheelie bin?
The plural of wheelie bin is wheelie bins.

Words near wheelie bin in the dictionary

  1. wheelhouse
  2. wheelhouses
  3. wheelie
  4. wheelie bag
  5. wheelie bags
  6. wheelie bin
  7. wheelie bins
  8. wheelie-bin
  9. wheelie-bins
  10. wheelied
  11. wheelieing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wheelie bin (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-au-wheelie bin.ogg.

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