wheel around

• wheel round (chiefly British)

wheel around

1. (transitive) To transport someone or something to various locations by pushing a wheeled transporter such as a wheelchair, wheelbarrow or trolley.
   • 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Two, Chapter 9,

     […] meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen.

2. (intransitive) To change direction quickly, turn, pivot, whirl around.
   • 1841, Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter 65,

     The pony made a moment’s pause; but, as if it occurred to him that to stop when he was required might be to establish an inconvenient and dangerous precedent, he immediately started off again, rattled at a fast trot to the street corner, wheeled round, came back, and then stopped of his own accord.

   • 1908, O. Henry, “Squaring the Circle” in The Voice of the City, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1914, pp. 130-131,

     At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam’s ear. He wheeled around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine.

3. (transitive) To cause to change direction quickly, turn.
   • 1834, “Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara” in The Quarterly Review, London: John Murray, Volume 52, August and November, 1834, p. 387,

     The river of Cabool was crossed on a raft supported on inflated skins […] Its rapidity, formed into eddies, wheeled them round, and they had the agreeable satisfaction of being told that, if carried some way down, there was a whirlpool round which, if once enclosed in its circle, they might revolve, in hunger and giddiness, for a whole day.

   • 1887, Leo Tolstoy, “The Invaders” (1853) in The Invaders and Other Stories, translated by Nathan Haskell Dole, New York: T.Y. Crowell & Co., pp. 29-30,

     As soon as the crossing was effected, the general’s face suddenly took on an expression of deliberation and seriousness; he wheeled his horse around, and at full gallop rode across the wide forest-surrounded field which spread before us.

4. (intransitive) In dancing, when a couple, holding hands, turns around 180 degrees, with the left hand dancer moving backward and the right hand dancer moving forward.
   • 1950, Lee Owens and Viola Ruth, Advanced Square Dance Figures of the West and Southwest, Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, “The Do-Si-Do Shuffle,” p. 108,

     When in Opposites’ positions, the two Head Couples dance a Right and Left Through to their home place where they wheel around to face the center.

• wheel about