A wheeler is someone or something that wheels, which means to move on wheels or to push something with wheels. You might see warehouse workers wheeling carts loaded with boxes down long aisles, or nurses wheeling patients on gurneys through hospital corridors.

The word also appears in compound terms that describe vehicles by their number of wheels. An eighteen-wheeler is a massive truck with eighteen wheels total, counting both the tractor (the front part with the engine) and the trailer (the cargo section). These trucks haul everything from food to furniture across the country. A four-wheeler is a small, all-terrain vehicle with four wheels, designed for riding over rough ground like trails or fields.

In older English, people sometimes used wheeler to describe a horse positioned near the wheels of a carriage, closest to the vehicle it was pulling. This usage has mostly disappeared, but you might encounter it in historical novels.

When combined with “dealer,” the phrase wheeler-dealer describes someone who makes deals constantly, often in a shrewd or slightly sneaky way. A wheeler-dealer is always negotiating, trading, and trying to get the best arrangement possible, like a kid who trades lunch snacks so skillfully that they always end up with what they want.