Word.ws English Dictionary

wheeling around

wheeling around is the present participle and gerund 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

Questions about wheeling around

What is wheeling around the present participle and gerund of?
Wheeling around is the present participle and gerund of wheel around.

Words near wheeling around in the dictionary

  1. wheelies
  2. wheeliest
  3. wheeling
  4. wheeling about
  5. wheeling and dealing
  6. wheeling around
  7. wheeling away
  8. wheeling machine
  9. wheeling machines
  10. wheeling out
  11. wheeling round

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wheeling around (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: “wheeling around.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wheeling_around. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.