Other forms: rewinding, rewinds
To rewind is to wind something back to an earlier point. The whirr of a tape going backwards.
The word belongs to cassettes and videotapes, where rewinding was a real physical process that took time, and video shops fined you for not doing it. Digital playback kept the word and the button even though nothing winds any more. It has a lively figurative use in speech, since saying rewind a second means go back and say that again. The past tense is rewound, following the same pattern as wind and wound.
Middle English
wynd
English
wind
English, today
rewind
Built from
From re- + wind. wind comes from Middle English wynd. From Middle English wynd,wind, from Old English wind (“wind”), from Proto-West Germanic wind, from Proto-Germanic windaz, from Proto-Indo-European h₂wéh₁n̥tos (“wind”), from earlier h₂wéh₁n̥ts (“wind”), derived from the present participle of h₂weh₁- (“to blow”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA