roulette

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See also: Roulette

English

A postcard from the 1930s or 1940s featuring roulette players
A collection of engraving roulettes

Etymology

Borrowed from French roulette (“roulette, little wheel”). The sense "situation with a random chance of incurring serious harm" may be abstracted from Russian roulette.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ɹuːˈlɛt/
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • Rhymes: -ɛt

Noun

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

roulette (countable and uncountable, plural roulettes)

  1. (uncountable) A game of chance in which a small ball is made to move round rapidly on a circle divided off into numbered (usually red and black) spaces. When the ball stops, it indicates the result of a variety of wagers permitted by the game.
    Synonym: (historical) roly-poly
  2. (uncountable, figuratively) An instance of risk-taking, especially when the downside exceeds the upside (contrary to the game of roulette where only the wager is lost).
    • 1982 April 28, Donna Hilts, “TV Report On Vaccine Stirs Bitter Controversy”, in Washington Post:
      Doctors and health officials said that the WRC-TV documentary, "DPT: Vaccine Roulette," emphasized the risks of the vaccine while ignoring the dangers of the disease, which has been almost wiped out in this country.
    • 2020 June 23, John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 290:
      They would all rather take their chances with the existing policy-making roulette rather than follow process discipline.
    • 2020 November 2, Adam Finn quoted by Alessandra Scotto Di Santolo in Daily Express:
      By contrast giving treatments open-label slows everything down by leading us up blind alleys while playing roulette with our patients' lives.
  3. (countable) A small toothed wheel used by engravers to roll over a plate in order to produce rows of dots.
  4. (countable) A similar wheel used to roughen the surface of a plate, as in making alterations in a mezzotint.
  5. (countable, geometry) The locus of a point on a plane curve that rolls without slipping along another fixed plane curve.
  6. (philately) Any of the small incisions on a sheet of stamps, used as an alternative to perforations.
  7. A cylindrical curler for the hair.

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

Verb

roulette (third-person singular simple present roulettes, present participle rouletting, simple past and past participle rouletted)

  1. To separate or decorate by incisions made with a small toothed wheel.
    to roulette a sheet of postage stamps

See also

References

French

French Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia fr

Etymology

From rouler +‎ -ette.

Pronunciation

Noun

roulette f (plural roulettes)

  1. small wheel
  2. caster, castor
  3. (geometry, archaic) cycloid
  4. roulette (game)
  5. roulette wheel
  6. (engraving) roulette
  7. roller
    patin à roulettes ― roller skating
  8. (dentistry) dentist drill
  9. pastry roller

Synonyms

Derived terms

Descendants

References

Further reading

Italian

Etymology

Borrowed from French roulette.

Pronunciation

Noun

roulette f (invariable)

  1. roulette (game of chance)

Derived terms

References

  1. ^ roulette in Luciano Canepari, Dizionario di Pronuncia Italiana (DiPI)

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