Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To breathe with difficulty, producing a hoarse whistling sound.
- v. To make a sound resembling laborious breathing.
- v. To produce or utter with a hoarse whistling sound: The old locomotive wheezed steam.
- n. A wheezing sound.
- n. Informal An old joke.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To breathe hard; puff and blow; breathe with difficulty and audibly.
- n. A puffing or blowing, especially as in labored breathing.
Wiktionary
- n. A piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration.
- n. An ordinary whisper exaggerated so as to produce the hoarse sound known as the "stage whisper"; a forcible whisper with some admixture of tone.
- n. UK, slang An ulterior scheme or plan
- n. slang Something very humorous or laughable.
- v. To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.
- n. A piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration.
- n. (Phon.) An ordinary whisper exaggerated so as to produce the hoarse sound known as the “stage whisper.” It is a forcible whisper with some admixture of tone.
WordNet 3.0
- n. breathing with a husky or whistling sound
- n. (Briticism) a clever or amusing scheme or trick
- v. breathe with difficulty
Etymologies
- From Middle English whesen, perhaps from Old Norse hvæsa ("to hiss"), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kwes- (“to pant”). (Wiktionary)
- Middle English whesen, probably from Old Norse hvæsa, to hiss; see kwes- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“One short-term wheeze is that the day after the May elections and referendum – whoever has won – Cameron and Nick Clegg will do a joint press conference renewing their rose-garden vows.”
The Guardian: David Davis takes up challenge to prepare next round of Tory policies
“The night was a wonder of shadowless trees, a giant thrall — a wheeze from the dome where the sky now was, then nothing at all.”
“The latest wheeze is to tax employees if their employer provides parking spaces.”
“This votin 'for president wheeze is turning out to be lots more fun than I had anticipated.”
“The Huntsman has noted this in the Telegraph which suggests that Macivty's latest wheeze is to plan for the next General Election to be held on 11th.”
“The snort-wheeze is a seldom heard vocalization that a buck makes to challenge an intruder.”
Scott Bestul's Six Tricks for Fooling Trophy Whitetail Bucks During the Rut
“a grunt call with a snort wheeze is one of the best calls out there. it can really bring in a bruiser.”
“Since the inception of mobile phones for our Neighbourhood Policing Teams, our control room’s latest wheeze is to deal with incidents by giving callers that mobile number.”
“Their latest wheeze is one that I have mentioned before but an interesting update was in yesterday's Times: THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.”
An Englishman's home is his castle - (no more) and his PC is to be an open book
“But that has not stopped the desperate Republicans, fearing their party’s brand: the latest wheeze is to remove party affiliations from the candidates in the Senate race (just the Senate race, not all of them).”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘wheeze’.
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*e?e
Words whose last and third-to-last letters are both "e".
here, eke, were, complete, mete, replete, adhere, where, mere, sphere, austere, aesthete and 99 more...
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Sounds
words that describe sound
atchoo, atishoo, babble, bam, bay, beep, blast, blather, bleat, bleep, blip, bong and 242 more...
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sound (quiet)
words for quiet sounds
( randomness, descriptive )sigh, murmur, whisper, whir, rustle, patter, hum, snap, hiss(sss), crackle, bleat, peep and 185 more...
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That's funny...
words that make you smile...
can be funny words, oxymorons or words describing laughter and fun.giggle, sniggle, snicker, chuckle, titter, guffaw, smile, hoot, twitter, hee-haw, tee-hee, snort and 68 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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Revised GRE Wordlist_2013
Vocabulary building for my quest of GRE 2013
ephemeral, esoteric, rhetoric, censure, egregious, pittance, dupe, mulct, paucity, alacrity, maintain, laconic and 997 more...
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Reading Reading
Words from the works of Peter Reading - at least one from each (except the Schwitters-esque erosions, cut-ups etc).
overbright, pimpled, muskiness, effuse, stoup, maul, unlevel, viscid, perfidious, glibly, aloes, drouth and 449 more...
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stpeter's Words
abase, abasement, abashed, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abhorrent, abide, abject, ablation, abnegation and 3536 more...
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words
diplopic, dolorous, farrago, surety, scuttlebutt, Arabesque, infarct, neurasthenia, lambent, expurge, univocal, simper and 395 more...
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Monovocalics
Words that have only one of the vowels. On this list I include only words with at least three vowels. When I first started the list, if a word had several forms, I generally listed only the one wit...
syzygy, mirific, cumulus, homolog, monocot, bedewed, jezebel, referee, bikini, minikin, locomotor, terebenthene and 2359 more...
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fbharjo's Words
jumelle, kef, kenspeckle, lautitious, essentic, pilpulistic, impavid, cicurant, clou, chrysostomic, miasma, teleology and 1625 more...
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ifjuly's list
favorite words. some are made up injokes between me and my husband or family.
skein, zaftig, july, bed, orifice, aesthete, ink, parce-que, desormais, cake, pusillanimous, pulse and 531 more...
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Spiftacular's Words
spiffy, orchestra, skulduggery, antipathy, leap, sonata, opus, dug, deed, fabulous, nifty, glisten and 221 more...
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Laughter
fleer, chortle, wheeze, chuckle, guffaw, hoot, whoop, cackle, keckle, snigger, titter, snicker and 6 more...
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Monbiot
Bitsies from the writings of George Monbiot.
swivel-eyed maniac, care in the commu..., room-temperature IQ, caciquismo, aurochs, the little orches..., farmyard porn, stamp scrip, wheeze, great bog of fudg..., testeria, cod up and 19 more...
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Lungodly
Words for the respirationist.
vaporizer, bronchitis, apnea, quackle, aluminosis, toke, valsalva maneuver, asthma, ventilation, hiccup, cough, snore and 62 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for wheeze.
bilby "In March last year, for example, we discovered that the government passed data which it had withheld from the public to the airport operator BAA. The data showed that a third runway at Heathrow would immediately breach European noise and pollution limits, ensuring that it could never be built. BAA and the government worked together to re-engineer the figures to fit the limits. Their fake data was then presented to the public in the government’s consultation paper(7,8). It was used again this month to justify the decision to approve the third runway. This is the kind of wheeze you’d expect in Nigeria."
- George Monbiot, Squandered, monbiot.com, 27 January 2009. Feb 18, 2010
yarb ...hearing the second-rate asthmatic wheeze
of this ephemeral trite Audenese...
- Peter Reading, Dead Horse, from Water and Waste, 1974 Jun 22, 2008