Wheeled

How to spell wheeled

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wheeled

What does wheeled mean?

1. verbMoved something along on wheels, or turned sharply as if pivoting on a point.
2. adjectiveEquipped with or mounted on wheels.

Wheeled in a sentence

• verb

  The porter wheeled our luggage to the platform.

• adjective

  The army deployed a fleet of wheeled vehicles.

• verb

  She wheeled around when she heard the alarm.

• adjective

  A wheeled walker helped him move around the house.

Where does wheeled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word descends from the Old English hweol, also spelled hweogol, naming the circular rotating object fitted to carts and machinery. It belongs to a wide family of words for things that turn in a circle, and shares a distant ancestor with the Greek kuklos, meaning 'circle' (the source of 'cycle'), and the Sanskrit cakra, meaning 'wheel' or 'disc'. The spelling kept the silent 'h' after the 'w' that marked the older 'hw' sound of Anglo-Saxon English, which is exactly the trap modern writers face when they want to drop it. The verb sense, meaning to move something along on wheels or to turn sharply as if pivoting, grew naturally out of the noun. Adding the ordinary past-tense and adjectival ending -ed gives 'wheeled', covering both the action that happened and the quality of having wheels.

How the word is built

• wheel (Old English hweol: a circular rotating disc)
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)

Words that sound like wheeled

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

• wield: To hold and use a tool or weapon with skill, or to exercise power, influence, or authority.