Roulette definition: 1. A game of chance in which a small ball is dropped onto a wheel that is spinning and the players. Synonyms for roulette include game of chance, poker, bingo, bridge, canasta, craps, crazy eights, gambling game, gin and gin rummy. Find more similar words at wordhippo.com!

English[edit]

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for roulette in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.)

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Frenchroulette(“roulette, little wheel”).

Pronunciation[edit]

• Rhymes: -ɛt

Noun[edit]

roulette (countable and uncountable, pluralroulettes)

1. (uncountable) A game of chance, in which a small ball is made to move round rapidly on a circle divided off into numbered red and black spaces, the one on which it stops indicating the result of a variety of wagers permitted by the game.
2. (uncountable,figurative) 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[1]:

     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 cylindricalcurler for the hair.

Derived terms[edit]

Related terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

roulette (third-person singular simple presentroulettes, present participlerouletting, simple past and past participlerouletted)

1. To separate or decorate by incisions made with a small toothed wheel.

   to roulette a sheet of postage stamps

See also[edit]

French[edit]

Etymology[edit]

rouler +‎ -ette

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /ʁu.lɛt/

• Audio

Noun[edit]

roulettef (pluralroulettes)

1. caster, castor
2. (geometry,archaic)cycloid
3. roulette(game)
4. (engraving)roulette
5. roller
6. (dentistry)dentistdrill

Synonyms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Descendants[edit]

• → Catalan: ruleta
• → Czech: ruleta
• → Danish: roulette, roulet
• → English: roulette
• → Galician: ruleta
• → German: Roulette (see there for further descendants)
• → Italian: roulette
• → Japanese: ルーレット
• → Norwegian Bokmål: rulett
• → Norwegian Nynorsk: rulett
• → Portuguese: roleta
• → Spanish: ruleta
• → Swedish: roulett
• → Thai: รูเล็ตต์(ruu-lèt)

References[edit]

• WordReference, roulette

Further reading[edit]

• “roulette” in Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).

Italian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Borrowed from Frenchroulette.

Noun[edit]

roulettef (invariable)

1. roulette(game of chance)

Derived terms[edit]

• roulette russa(“Russian roulette”)

Roulette Synonym In English Dictionary

Anagrams[edit]

Roulette Synonyms In English

noun

Roulette Synonym In English Grammar

• 1A gambling game in which a ball is dropped onto a revolving wheel (roulette wheel) with numbered compartments, the players betting on the number at which the ball will come to rest.

  ‘The book does provide reasonable introductions to several casino games, such as roulette, craps, and baccarat.’

  • ‘The site offers slots, roulette and animated card games including poker and blackjack.’
  • ‘Players at the hotel's casino can choose from four gambling tables, three of them for card games and one for roulette.’
  • ‘Do not assume you will ever be a winner in the long run at negative expectation games (e.g., craps, roulette, baccarat, keno, most slots).’
  • ‘In a game of roulette, assuming the wheel is fairly balanced, you might say that the past results show that you can't tell what's coming next.’
  • ‘It was pretty much an all night event at a recreation center that had ping-pong, racquetball, casino games like blackjack and roulette, and basketball courts.’
  • ‘Gaming tables, electronic roulette and rows of Las Vegas-style slots fill the casino floor, divided into smoking and non-smoking areas.’
  • ‘New fixed-odds terminals featuring a number of games including roulette were named as the driving force of recent growth at the group's 2,000 betting shops.’
  • ‘Risk, he argued, was a randomness - as in a game of roulette - whose probability could be determined.’
  • ‘His books on blackjack, roulette, video poker, craps, slots and new games are consistently on the most-requested books lists of Ingram and other distributors.’
  • ‘Roulette is the most popular game in Europe; where there is only one zero on the wheel, and the player's money lasts longer.’
  • ‘Were this to be your goal, roulette could still be your game but an alternate approach would be appropriate.’
  • ‘There are five information-packed little sections on roulette.’
  • ‘It is one of the best resources for isolating some of the earliest refinements by cheats for shooting craps and for cheating at roulette.’
  • ‘Some 1800 people have registered for online roulette from the casino since the service opened in July.’
  • ‘The artist was famous, of course, for his preoccupation with chess and roulette.’
  • ‘Blackjack is the only game in town, because unlike roulette or craps, what has gone before will influence what is about to happen.’
  • ‘Jean, a young man who works as a bank clerk, is invited to the casino by a friend and promptly wins big at roulette.’
  • ‘Explaining that he'd been playing roulette, his wife asked how he did.’
  • ‘Day after day, he loses at poker, he loses at roulette, and he loses in life - for he's now addicted to heroin.’

• 2A tool or machine with a revolving toothed wheel, used in engraving or for making slit-shaped perforations between postage stamps.

  ‘This is a method of puncturing a plate with roulettes, punches, and other tools so that modelling is achieved with greater or lesser accumulations of dots.’

  • ‘Frequently the engraver began by etching the foundation of the design, and then built it up by the use of a special curved burin and by roulettes, punches, and other tools.’

transitive verb

• Make slit-shaped perforations in (paper, especially sheets of postage stamps)

  • ‘the pages are rouletted next to the binding’

Origin

Mid 18th century from French, diminutive of rouelle ‘wheel’, from late Latin rotella, diminutive of Latin rota ‘wheel’.