wheeze

From Middle English whesen, perhaps from Old Norse hvæsa (“to hiss”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwes- (“to pant”).

• enPR: wēz, IPA^(key): /ʍiːz/, /wiːz/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːz
• Homophones: wees, Wiis (in accents with the wine-whine merger)

wheeze (third-person singular simple present wheezes, present participle wheezing, simple past and past participle wheezed)

1. 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.

2. (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.

3. 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.

wheeze (plural wheezes)

1. A piping or whistling sound caused by difficult respiration.
2. An ordinary whisper exaggerated so as to produce the hoarse sound known as the "stage whisper"; a forcible whisper with some admixture of tone.
3. (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:

     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.

4. (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!

5. A sound that resembles a human wheezing.
   • 2016, Heather Hildenbrand, A Bet Worth Making‎:

     At the same time I felt them fall over my brows — time to get a cut — the engine gave a final wheeze and died.

• “wheeze”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
• “wheeze”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• Jonathon Green (2024) “wheeze n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang