Wheels

How to spell wheels

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wheels

What does wheels mean?

1. nounCircular objects that turn on an axle to allow movement or to drive machinery.
2. nounInformal term for a person's car or means of transport.

Wheels in a sentence

• The front wheels on the trolley had seized with rust.

• Now that she passed her test, she finally has her own wheels.

• He greased the wheels before the long journey north.

• He borrowed his brother's wheels for the weekend trip.

Where does wheels come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word goes back to the Old English hweol or hweogol, which named the round, rotating disc fitted to carts and machinery. That form descended from a Proto-Germanic root and ultimately from the reconstructed Indo-European word kwekwlos, which literally meant 'a circle' and was itself formed by doubling a root meaning 'to turn'. The same ancient root travelled into Greek as kuklos, 'circle', which is why 'wheel' and 'cycle' are distant cousins from a single turning idea. English has used the plural form since the earliest written records, and the modern spelling keeps the silent 'wh' cluster that once carried a breathy 'hw' sound, the trap that still makes some writers drop the 'h'. In casual modern speech the plural also came to mean a motor car, a sense that grew in the twentieth century from the idea of the wheels that carry you.

How the word is built

• wheel (from Old English hweol: a circular rotating object)
• -s (plural)