wheel [OE] The wheel was probably invented some time around 4000 bc in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Its name, probably based on a word meaning ‘to turn’, moved east to India, where it produced Sanskrit cakra ‘wheel, circle’, source of the chakra [L19th] of yoga, and west, where it gave rise to Greek kuklos ‘circle’, the source of cycle [LME] and cyclone [M19th]. It is recorded in Anglo-Saxon English from about ad 900. To reinvent the wheel is a 20th-century expression. Wheels within wheels is an allusion to a biblical quotation from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. The prophet Ezekiel sees a vision in which four cherubs appear: ‘And as for their appearances, they four had one likeness, as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel’.