roulette
[roo-let]
- a game of chance played at a table marked off with numbers from 1 to 36, one or two zeros, and several other sections affording the players a variety of betting opportunities, and having in the center a revolving, dishlike device (roulette wheel) into which a small ball is spun to come to rest finally in one of the 37 or 38 compartments, indicating the winning number and its characteristics, as odd or even, red or black, and between 1 and 18 or 19 and 36.
- a small wheel, especially one with sharp teeth, mounted in a handle, for making lines of marks, dots, or perforations: engravers' roulettes; a roulette for perforating sheets of postage stamps.
- Philately. a row of short cuts, in which no paper is removed, made between individual stamps to permit their ready separation.
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- to mark, impress, or perforate with a roulette.
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Origin of roulette
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for roulette
Contemporary Examples
It shows that the Malaysian airliner may well have fallen victim to a high-altitude game of Russian roulette.
“It is like Russian roulette to use these drugs,” he told WebMd in 2010.
After finding Manning guilty of six counts of spying under the Espionage Act, however, America may be playing Russian roulette.
He also ran Roulette Records and golfed on occasion with Sammy Davis, Jr.
For those patients, getting treated at Rose was like inadvertently playing a game of Russian roulette.
Historical Examples
That was the kind of roulette wheel a man might really take an interest in!
Peak and PrairieAnna Fuller
In the casino a crowd is gathering round the roulette wheel.
The Trail of '98Robert W. Service
And did the old Romans really play at roulette, and was that one of their tables?
MemoirsCharles Godfrey Leland
There was also a roulette wheel, which didn't hurt the looks of the place either.
Sonnie-Boy's PeopleJames B. Connolly
The best thing he did of that kind was the roulette story at Paris.
The Young DukeBenjamin Disraeli
roulette
- a gambling game in which a ball is dropped onto a spinning horizontal wheel divided into 37 or 38 coloured and numbered slots, with players betting on the slot into which the ball will fall
- a toothed wheel for making a line of perforations
- a tiny slit made by such a wheel on a sheet of stamps as an aid to tearing it apart
- a curve generated by a point on one curve rolling on another
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- to use a roulette on (something), as in engraving, making stationery, etc
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Word Origin
C18: from French, from rouelle a little wheel, from roue a wheel, from Latin rota
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Word Origin and History for roulette
n.
1734, "small wheel," from French roulette "gambling game played with a revolving wheel," literally "small wheel," from Old French roelete "little wheel" (12c.), formed on model of Late Latin rotella, diminutive of Latin rota "wheel" (see rotary). The game of chance so-called from 1745.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper