Wheel

How to spell wheel

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wheel

What does wheel mean?

1. nounA circular object that turns on an axle, used to move a vehicle or machine.
2. verbTo push or move something mounted on wheels, or to turn and change direction.

Wheel in a sentence

• noun

  The front wheel of the car was badly buckled after the pothole.

• verb

  The nurse will wheel the trolley into the recovery room.

• noun

  He gripped the steering wheel tightly on the icy motorway.

• verb

  She had to wheel her bike up the steep hill to the station.

Where does wheel come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wheel descends from the Old English hweol, also spelled hweogol, which named the round turning disc fitted to a cart or chariot. That word grew from the Proto-Germanic hwehwlan and ultimately from an ancient Indo-European root that linguists reconstruct as kwekwlo, meaning literally 'a circle' or 'something that turns'. Remarkably, the same distant root produced the Greek kuklos, which gives us 'cycle' and 'cyclone', so a wheel and a bicycle are cousins many thousands of years apart. The 'wh' spelling preserves an old breathy sound the Anglo-Saxons actually pronounced, and it is exactly this silent, leading 'w' that turns wheel into a homophone of 'we'll' and 'weal' and makes the spelling a trap. The plain everyday sense, a rolling disc on an axle, has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• wheel (from Old English hweol: a turning disc); a single, unsuffixed root with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like wheel

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• we'll: A contraction of 'we will' or 'we shall', used to state a future action or intention by the speaker and others.