Word.ws English Dictionary

wintle

Syllables: win·tle/ˈwɪntəl/

wintle verb: to wind, to reel.

Verb

wintle (third-person singular simple present wintles, present participle wintling, simple past and past participle wintled)

  1. (Scotland) To wind, to reel.
    • The worm of hell, which never dies, / In wintled coil writhes up and fries.c. 1688-1746, Author not recorded, Cumberland and Murray's Descent into Hell, 1861, Charles Mackay (editor), The Jacobite Songs and Ballads of Scotland from 1688 to 1746, page 266
    • Along the cliffs a breeze wintled.1974, Austin Clarke, quoted in 1981, G. Craig Tapping, Austin Clarke: A Study of His Writings, page 282
  2. (Scotland) To stagger, to sway or rock.
  3. (Scotland) To tumble, to capsize.
    • At a quick turn o' the road they wintled owre, and there they were, sitting on their doups in the atoms o' the gig, and glowering frae them!1901, George Douglas Brown, The House with the Green Shutters, published 2011, page 214
  4. (Scotland) To wriggle.
    • Miss Radford wintled across the floor on her bottom until she slumped beside Eloise, who rolled her eyes and bared her lower teeth.2002, Micaela Gilchrist, The Good Journey, US, page 222

Proper noun capitalized: Wintle

Wintle

  1. A surname.

Forms of wintle

third-person singular presentwintles
present participlewintling
past participlewintled
pastwintled

Origin of wintle

Perhaps from a Flemish dialect of Dutch windtelen (“to reel”); compare wentelen.

Words formed from wintle

Words that rhyme with wintle

Questions about wintle

What does wintle mean?
Wintle means to wind, to reel.
What part of speech is wintle?
Wintle can be a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce wintle?
Wintle is pronounced /ˈwɪntəl/.
What is the past tense of wintle?
The past tense of wintle is wintled.

Words near wintle in the dictionary

  1. Winther
  2. Winthers
  3. Winthrop
  4. Winthrop desk
  5. Winthrop desks
  6. wintle
  7. wintled
  8. wintler
  9. wintlers
  10. wintles
  11. wintling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wintle (page history and authors); Wintle (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: “wintle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wintle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.