daisy wheel
- noun
- /ˈdeɪzi wɪl/
- Archaic
:
rueda de margarita
- In the 1980s, many offices used a daisy wheel printer to create typed reports quickly.
Examples
-
She skimmed it, her heart pounding out each word like an old daisy wheel printer:
Fiction book (1999) -
The daisy wheel buzzsaws across the page.
Fiction book (2002) -
The daisy wheel buzzes, pounding letters onto the print page.
Fiction book (2002) -
Not a shared history or language, nor an appreciation of arts and science, but a multi-cabled web of monitors, megabytes, microprocessors, and daisy wheel printers?
Academic text (2006) -
Back when I had just my electric typewriter, I was so jazzed that I had not one, but two daisy wheels, each one with a different font (pica and elite) to choose from.
Blog text (19) -
The daisy wheel prints clear letters and is essential for making professional-looking documents.
-
She replaced the old cartridge with a new daisy wheel to improve the printing quality.
Synonyms
A round wheel with letters on spokes that prints letters on paper
Surface Forms
Morphology
daisy + wheel
The parts 'daisy' (a flower) and 'wheel' (a round rotating object) transparently suggest a wheel shaped or arranged like a daisy, so learners would likely infer its form from the constituents. However, the specific technical function—as a typewriter/printer element with characters around its edge—is specialized and not fully derivable from the words alone, so the full meaning is not completely predictable.
Etymology
Daisy wheel comes from the round printing part that looks like a small wheel with letters around its edge, like the petals of a daisy. That's why the name fits: it is a wheel of letters used 'to print' each character on the page.
