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roulette

UK/ɹuːˈlɛt/US/ɹuːˈlɛt/
nounB2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,387 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: roulettes

Roulette is a gambling game played with a spinning numbered wheel. Play roulette, the roulette wheel, Russian roulette.

The house edge comes from the zero, which pays nothing on red or black, and the American wheel has two zeros, which doubles the edge. Russian roulette is a quite different and lethal thing that borrows only the name.

Ralf Roletschek · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of roulette

  1. 1nounrouletteA gambling game played with a spinning numbered wheel.B2+

    “He put all his chips on red and watched the roulette wheel spin.”

roulette is a game.

Where it comes from

French roulette means a little wheel, from rouelle, a small wheel.

  1. French

    roulette — roulette, little wheel

  2. English, today

    roulette

French roulette (“roulette, little wheel”). The sense "situation with a random chance of incurring serious harm" may be abstracted from Russian roulette.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

roulette in the wild

  • Producer Michael Deeley, who bought the script, hired Cimino, who, with Deric Washburn, rewrote the script, taking the Russian roulette element and placing it in the Vietnam War.

    The Deer Hunter

  • Russian roulette is a potentially lethal game of chance played with a revolver.

    Russian Roulette (disambiguation)

  • The title of the cartoon is a play on Russian roulette.

    Rushing Roulette

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.