pinwheel
Americannoun
-
a child's toy consisting of a wheel or leaflike curls of paper or plastic loosely attached by a pin to a stick, designed to revolve when blown by or as by the wind.
-
Also called catherine wheel. a kind of firework supported on a pin which, when ignited, revolves rapidly and gives a dazzling display of light.
-
a wheel having pins at right angles to its rim for engaging the teeth of a gear.
verb (used without object)
noun
-
another name for Catherine wheel
-
a cogwheel whose teeth are formed by small pins projecting either axially or radially from the rim of the wheel
-
Also called (in Britain and certain other countries): windmill. whirligig. a toy consisting of plastic or paper vanes attached to a stick in such a manner that they revolve like the sails of a windmill
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of pinwheel
Explanation
A pinwheel is a spinning toy that looks like a flower on a stick. Blow on it or run through the garden with one and watch it spin. Some things, like peppermints, have a pinwheel pattern. A pinwheel is a stick with twisted paper or plastic pieces that turn as they catch the wind. The original pinwheel, first called a whirligig, was invented in the nineteenth century by a woman who imagined children running while holding them in the air, which is exactly how pinwheels are usually played with. Before the toy, a pinwheel was a gear in a train's mechanism, and also a spinning firework also called a Catherine wheel.
Vocabulary lists containing pinwheel
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
For the first time our data allowed us to analyze the likely axis of a possible future burst from our pinwheel Wolf-Rayets.
From Scientific American ● Aug. 18, 2023
The image is all-too familiar: the pinwheel form of a hurricane on a radar map, spiraling across the Caribbean.
From New York Times ● Mar. 5, 2023
Their semi-cubicle workstations are are arranged in a pinwheel formation in the middle of a large, otherwise empty room, devoid of decoration.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 17, 2022
To make the pinwheel, Nicholson runs the balls of rainbow-colored dough through the pasta maker to make sheets and cuts the sheets into squares.
From Seattle Times ● Jan. 13, 2022
“Pa-RADE, pa-RADE, pa-RADE,” he chanted, his foil pinwheel spinning.
From "Caterpillar Summer" by Gillian McDunn
"The trick to achieving pinwheels that hold their shape and don't fall apart is to wrap the tortilla rolls in plastic wrap and refrigerate them for several hours before slicing."
From Fox News ● Feb. 10, 2022
Turn it into fun and easy pinwheels to affix to walls, doorways, bar carts, and anything else your heart desires.
From Salon ● Dec. 29, 2021
By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.
From New York Times ● Jan. 23, 2020
They form in twisted series so that microphotographs, which can only focus on one layer, produce impressions of spinning glass pinwheels.
From Scientific American ● Nov. 18, 2019
She made pinwheels of the whirling stars that had driven many a man mad.
From "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
