Wiktionary

airplane

English

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Boeing 737 airplane

Alternative forms

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Etymology

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Alteration of aeroplane (Borrowed from French aéroplane, from Ancient Greek ἀερόπλανος (aeróplanos, “wandering in air”), from ἀήρ (aḗr, “air”) + πλάνος (plános, “wandering”). First used by Joseph Pline in an 1855 patent.[1];[2])

Pronunciation

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Noun

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airplane (plural airplanes)

  1. (chiefly US, Canada, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand) A powered heavier-than-air aircraft with fixed wings.
    Hypernym: aircraft
  2. (chiefly US, Canada, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand) 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

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Translations

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Verb

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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

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Further reading

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Anagrams

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