Proper noun

1. The wheel of Fortune.
2. A wheel of fortune; a big six wheel.
3. A television game show where word puzzles are solved by filling in the letters, like hangman, with a category clue.

Quotations

• 1980s, Dennis Miller, “Weekend Update”, Saturday Night Live

  ...Wheel of Fortune prices.

• 1998, George J. Hademenos, Physics for Pre-Med, Biology, and Allied Health Students, Schaum's Outlines, McGraw-Hill Professional, ISBN 0070254745, page 140

  Solved Problem 9.2. Jerry, a contestant on Wheel of Fortune, is asked to spin the wheel 2.5-m diameter. If he exerts a tangential force of 75 N for his spin, what torque is exerted on the wheel?

• 2000, Eric T. Olson and Tammy Perry Olson, Real-Life Math: Statistics, Walch Publishing, ISBN 0825138639, page 56

  Start by asking students if they ever watch Wheel of Fortune, or play games like Hangman or Scrabble.^® Ask whether they have ever noticed any patterns in the frequency with which letters appear.

• 2001, Tony Marsland and Ian Frank (editors), Computers and Games, Second International Conference, CG 2000, Hamamatsu, Japan, October 2000, Revised Papers, Springer, ISBN 3540430806, page 398

  The Wheel of Fortune is a similar game, with three players competing to be the first to solve a hangman-like puzzle. There are two significant differences in the puzzle, however, that suggest that Wheel of Fortune should be classified as a language game and hangman a word game. First, Wheel of Fortune answers are often names of people or short phrases

• 2003, Josh Lewin, Getting in the Game, Inside Baseball's Winter Meetings, Brassey’s, ISBN 1574887912, page 46

  A middle-aged man in a faded blue windbreaker walks through the Governor’s ballroom lobby.... “Is this where the Wheel of Fortune auditions are?” he asks. A hotel official tells him he’s in the wrong wing of the hotel... Actually he’s not that far off, if you want to get cosmic about it. Except PBEO’s Ann Perkins would claim little in common with Vanna White.

• 2003, Markus Friedl, Online Game Interactivity Theory, Charles River Media, ISBN 1584502150, page 48

  The density of these games, however, is not limited and can range from very simple variations of Chess, Backgammon, Hearts, or Wheel of Fortune to very complex real-time strategy games or shooters. (Strictly speaking, Half Life and Day of Defeat are nothing more than round-based MPOOG.)

• 2003, Matthew McIntosh, Well, Grove Press, ISBN 0802117511, page 43

  ...we’d sit there watching Wheel of Fortune unless it was Sunday but we never did it on Sunday—and now that I think about it I don’t think we ever did it before seven o’clock—because it always started with Wheel of Fortune...and this girl would always solve the puzzles before me or before anyone on the show except she always had trouble with this one guy who was always getting them after one or two letters and consequently not winning much dough—but we’d watch Wheel and after Wheel we’d watch Jeopardy which again she was much better at than me...

• 2003, Stephen Pite, The Digital Designer, 101 Graphic Design Projects for Print, the Web, Multimedia & Motion, Thomson Delmar Learning, ISBN 0766873471, page 172

  For instance, suppose our subject is the “History of 0.” The invention of the wheel, the invention of zero, the construction of the Roman Coliseum, the invention of the compass, the development of the traffic circle, Pauline Reage’s book The Story of 0, and the Wheel of Fortune could be events indicated along a linear flow of time extending from prehistory through contemporary time.

• 2004, Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman, Game Design Workshop, Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games, CMP Books, ISBN 1578202221, page 380

  Figure 14.2 is an example of a game flowchart...for an online multiplayer version of the Wheel of Fortune game.... Figure 14.3 shows an interface wireframe from Wheel of Fortune, an early concept sketch for the interface, and the final interface as released.

• 2004, Lee Sheldon, Character Development and Storytelling for Games, Thomson Course Technology, ISBN 1592003532, page 37

  It’s not enough to heedlessly scatter characters throughout a game like chicken feed in the barnyard mud because we need an adversary at this moment, a merchant here, or a puzzle-giver there. Characters in games must be more than clones of Vanna White, magically revealing those letters on Wheel of Fortune. Characters have a right to their own lives in the game.