# wheeze
## English
### Etymology

From Middle English whesen, perhaps from Old Norse hvæsa (“to hiss”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwes- (“to pant”).

### Pronunciation

* enPR: wēz, IPA: /ʍiːz/, /wiːz/
* Audio (Southern England):(file)
* Rhymes: -iːz
* Homophones: wees, Wiis (wine–whine merger)

### Verb

wheeze (third-person singular simple present wheezes, present participle wheezing, simple past and past participle wheezed)
* To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.
** 2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance (Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 443)
    If the air smelled even faintly of dog, Lionel coughed, wheezed and sneezed.
* (slang) To convulse with laughter; to become breathless due to intense laughing.
** 1932, Herbert George Jenkins, Bindle Omnibus, page 408:Mrs. Hearty began to shake and wheeze with laughter, and Millie stood looking at Bindle.
** 1973, Robert Boston, A Thorn for the Flesh, page 30:He began to wheeze again, and tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks. Nate was laughing, too, infected by Check's contagious wheezing.
** 1988, Elizabeth Oldfield, Beware of Married Men, page 47:Elsie wheezed, laughter swelling her bosom.
** 1993, Richard S. Wheeler, The Two Medicine River, page 221:The man wheezed, his laughter like an accordion whine.
* To make a sound that resembles the sound of human wheezing.
** 1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 184:"Even the fish know it; they don't rise to the bait any more and the birds are scared - hear how they wheeze and cry as they seek the land."
** 2009, J. P. White, Every Boat Turns South, page 112:One boy in a black tuxedo and red shoes plays a wheezing accordion like a roadside undertaker.

#### Translations
### Noun

wheeze (plural wheezes)
* A piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration.
* An ordinary whisper exaggerated so as to produce the hoarse sound known as the "stage whisper"; a forcible whisper with some admixture of tone.
* (British, Ireland, informal) An ulterior scheme or plan.
** 1922 February, James Joyce, “[V]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC:Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze.
** 2011 November 19, “Road rage; High petrol prices hurt, but will not throttle the economy”, in The Economist‎:The main point of fuel duty, though, is as a fiscal wheeze: it made up 5% of the tax take in 2010.
** 2022, China Miéville, chapter 4, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:The Constitution cult in the US—deliberately stoked in the early twentieth century in a part as a bulwark against socialism—is a nastily brilliant wheeze by capitalism's apologists.
* (slang) Something very humorous or laughable.
    Synonyms: see Thesaurus:joke
    The new comedy is a wheeze.
    You think you're going to win? That's a real wheeze!
* A sound that resembles a human wheezing.
** 2016, Heather Hildenbrand, A Bet Worth Making‎:At the same time I felt them fall over my brows — time to get a cut — the engine gave a final wheeze and died.

#### Derived terms

* wheeze rate

#### Translations

    The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

### References

* “wheeze”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
* “wheeze”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
* “wheeze n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present