airplane

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search

English

[edit]
Boeing 737 airplane

Alternative forms

[edit]

Etymology

[edit]

air +‎ plane, alteration of aeroplane

Pronunciation

[edit]

Noun

[edit]

airplane (plural airplanes)

  1. (chiefly US, Canada, Philippines) A powered heavier-than-air aircraft with fixed wings.
    Hypernym: aircraft
  2. (chiefly US, Canada, Philippines) A game to encourage small children to eat, in which the parent or carer pretends a spoonful of food is an aircraft flying into the child's mouth.
    • 1988, Matthew Linn, Sheila Fabricant, Dennis Linn, Healing the Eight Stages of Life, Paulist Press, →ISBN, page 66:
      So, he'd take a spoon and he'd start playing airplane, circling the spoon around in the air until it was ready to land in the runway of my mouth.
    • 1997 03, Maria Flook, Open Water, Ecco Press, →ISBN:
      Willis wondered what this fellow wanted to do, spoon feed him? Play airplane?
    • 2013 May 13, Theo L. Dorpat, Michael L. Miller, Clinical Interaction and the Analysis of Meaning: A New Psychoanalytic Theory, Routledge, →ISBN:
      For instance, Jan has taken to playing airplane with the spoon to get Charley to attend to the spoon and want to take it into his mouth.

Derived terms

[edit]

Translations

[edit]

Verb

[edit]

airplane (third-person singular simple present airplanes, present participle airplaning, simple past and past participle airplaned)

  1. (intransitive) To fly in an aeroplane.
  2. (transitive) To transport by aeroplane.

See also

[edit]

Further reading

[edit]

Anagrams

[edit]