wheeze
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Middle English whesen, perhaps from Old Norse hvæsa (“to hiss”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwes- (“to pant”).
Pronunciation
[edit]- enPR: wēz, IPA(key): /ʍiːz/, /wiːz/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - Rhymes: -iːz
- Homophones: wees, Wiis (wine–whine merger)
Verb
[edit]wheeze (third-person singular simple present wheezes, present participle wheezing, simple past and past participle wheezed)
- To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.
- 2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance (Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 443)
- If the air smelled even faintly of dog, Lionel coughed, wheezed and sneezed.
- 2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance (Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 443)
- (slang) To convulse with laughter; to become breathless due to intense laughing.
- 1932, Herbert George Jenkins, Bindle Omnibus, page 408:
- Mrs. Hearty began to shake and wheeze with laughter, and Millie stood looking at Bindle.
- 1973, Robert Boston, A Thorn for the Flesh, page 30:
- He began to wheeze again, and tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks. Nate was laughing, too, infected by Check's contagious wheezing.
- 1988, Elizabeth Oldfield, Beware of Married Men, page 47:
- Elsie wheezed, laughter swelling her bosom.
- 1993, Richard S. Wheeler, The Two Medicine River, page 221:
- The man wheezed, his laughter like an accordion whine.
- To make a sound that resembles the sound of human wheezing.
- 1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 184:
- "Even the fish know it; they don't rise to the bait any more and the birds are scared - hear how they wheeze and cry as they seek the land."
- 2009, J. P. White, Every Boat Turns South, page 112:
- One boy in a black tuxedo and red shoes plays a wheezing accordion like a roadside undertaker.
Translations
[edit]breathe hard
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Noun
[edit]wheeze (plural wheezes)
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The sound of a man's wheeze
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- A piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration.
- An ordinary whisper exaggerated so as to produce the hoarse sound known as the "stage whisper"; a forcible whisper with some admixture of tone.
- (British, Ireland, informal) An ulterior scheme or plan.
- 1922 February, James Joyce, “[V]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC:
- Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze.
- 2011 November 19, “Road rage; High petrol prices hurt, but will not throttle the economy”, in The Economist[1]:
- The main point of fuel duty, though, is as a fiscal wheeze: it made up 5% of the tax take in 2010.
- 2022, China Miéville, chapter 4, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:
- The Constitution cult in the US—deliberately stoked in the early twentieth century in a part as a bulwark against socialism—is a nastily brilliant wheeze by capitalism's apologists.
- (slang) Something very humorous or laughable.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:joke
- The new comedy is a wheeze.
- You think you're going to win? That's a real wheeze!
- A sound that resembles a human wheezing.
- 2016, Heather Hildenbrand, A Bet Worth Making[2]:
- At the same time I felt them fall over my brows — time to get a cut — the engine gave a final wheeze and died.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration
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exaggerated whisper
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- The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked: "breathing hard"
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References
[edit]- “wheeze”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- “wheeze”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
- “wheeze n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present
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