Definition of "spinning wheel" []

• An apparatus for making yarn or thread, consisting of a foot-driven or hand-driven wheel and a single spindle. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "There was a random aspect to the game — a spinning wheel and dice determined plagues and famines and earthquakes and the like; this was the quickest fix, replaced by computerized random choice — but most of the action was generated by decisions and reactions that the players made, by their aggressions and their lust, their treaties and their double-crosses, their clashes and battles and betrayals."
• "She put aside the bolt of cotton cloth from which she was cutting shirts for the boys and their father-the spinning wheel and loom had fallen into disuse in most of the homes of Virginia since cotton goods could be manufactured so cheaply in the north-and examined her youngest son."