wheel around
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Forms: form: wheels around
form: wheeling around
form: wheeled around
form: wheeled around
form: wheel round
Senses: examples: text: […] meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen.
ref: 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, August 2001:
glosses: To transport someone or something to various locations by pushing a wheeled transporter such as a wheelchair, wheelbarrow or trolley.
examples: text: 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.
ref: 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:
text: At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam’s ear. He wheeled around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine.
ref: 1908, O. Henry, “Squaring the Circle”, in The Voice of the City, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, published 1914, pages 130–131:
text: The tide was out, and we drew up amid the strong bracing smell of seaweed, with gulls screeching, wheeling around, and gliding on the wind.
ref: 1947 January and February, O. S. Nock, “"The Aberdonian" in Wartime”, in Railway Magazine, page 8:
glosses: To change direction quickly, turn, pivot, whirl around.
examples: text: 1834, “Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara” in The Quarterly Review, London: John Murray, Volume 52, August and November, 1834, p. 387,
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 revolve, in hunger and giddiness, for a whole day.
text: As soon as the crossing was effected, the general’s face suddenly took on an expression of deliberation and seriousness; he wheeled his horse around, and at full gallop rode across the wide forest-surrounded field which spread before us.
ref: 1887, Leo Tolstoy, “The Invaders”, in Nathan Haskell Dole, transl., The Invaders and Other Stories, New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co., published 1853, pages 29–30:
glosses: To cause to change direction quickly, turn.
examples: 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,
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.
glosses: 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.
Synonyms: wheel about