Cartwheel

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /ˈkɑːtˌwiːl/

Definitions

1. A type of acrobatic movement that involves turning the body laterally while supporting oneself with the hands and feet together in a continuous flow
2. This refers to an agile motion characterized by the body rotating sideways while hands and feet contact the ground simultaneously
3. A lateral acrobatic maneuver where the performer rotates their body using hands and feet, creating a circular motion that resembles a wheel's roll

Etymology: The gymnastic move gets its name from a plain piece of farm equipment: a cart and its wheel. The word is a compound of "cart" and "wheel," and the image is literal. A cartwheel is a sideways turn of the body with the hands and feet touching the ground in turn, so the body moves like a wheel rolling along its rim. "Cart" traces back to Old Norse "kartr," a word that entered the language of the English through the Viking settlers, and it displaced the older Old English "crætt" in many uses. "Wheel" is an inherited word, descending from Old English "hwēol," which shares its ancestry with a wide family of words for turning objects. The compound itself is a straightforward description of what the body does. Nothing about the word is metaphorical beyond the comparison of a human body to a rolling wheel. Its use as both a noun and a verb follows the same pattern: the cartwheel is the move, and to cartwheel is to perform it.

Synonyms: handspring