wheeze

present singular third person wheezes · participle present wheezing · participle past wheezed · past wheezed

1. To breathe hard, and with an audible piping or whistling sound, as persons affected with asthma.

   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)

2. slangTo convulse with laughter; to become breathless due to intense laughing.

   Elsie wheezed, laughter swelling her bosom.

   1988, Elizabeth Oldfield, Beware of Married Men, page 47

   3 more examples

   Mrs. Hearty began to shake and wheeze with laughter, and Millie stood looking at Bindle.

   1932, Herbert George Jenkins, Bindle Omnibus, page 408

   He began to wheeze again, and tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks. Nate was laughing, too, infected by Check's contagious wheezing.

   1973, Robert Boston, A Thorn for the Flesh, page 30

   The man wheezed, his laughter like an accordion whine.

   1993, Richard S. Wheeler, The Two Medicine River, page 221

3. To make a sound that resembles the sound of human wheezing.

   One boy in a black tuxedo and red shoes plays a wheezing accordion like a roadside undertaker.

   2009, J. P. White, Every Boat Turns South, page 112

   1 more example

   "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."

   1886, Peter Christen Asbjø￵rnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 184

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. IrelandUKinformalAn ulterior scheme or plan.

   Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze.

   1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[V]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC

   3 more examples

   ‘It’s got a file and rope ladder in it and if you was a bit older I’d make you eat them both raw for trying to put such a moth-eaten old wheeze over on me.’

   1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 90

   The main point of fuel duty, though, is as a fiscal wheeze: it made up 5% of the tax take in 2010.

   2011 November 19, “Road rage; High petrol prices hurt, but will not throttle the economy”, in The Economist

   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.

   2022, China Miéville, chapter 4, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC

4. slangSomething very humorous or laughable.

   The new comedy is a wheeze.

   1 more example

   You think you're going to win? That's a real wheeze!

   Synonyms: joke

5. A sound that resembles a human wheezing.

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

   2016, Heather Hildenbrand, A Bet Worth Making