airplane

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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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