喜樂美語
  1. 1（船的）駕駛室、舵手室；美式口語 in one's wheelhouse＝正好是某人的專長／拿手項目

    On a ship or boat, the wheelhouse is the small covered room, high up, where the person steering stands at the wheel and looks out at the water. It is where the controls are, so it is the room from which the whole ship is guided. On big modern ships people more often say the bridge, and the two words overlap; wheelhouse tends to be used for smaller working boats — fishing boats, tugs, river boats — and has an older, more solid feeling. It is a countable noun: the wheelhouse, two wheelhouses. There is a second, very common meaning in American English that comes from baseball. In baseball, a batter has one area where a ball is easy and delicious to hit, and that area is called his wheelhouse. From there, people started saying "that's right in my wheelhouse" to mean "that is exactly the kind of thing I am good at, and I would enjoy doing it". This use is now everywhere in American offices and casual talk — "Ask Maria to do the design; it's in her wheelhouse." So if you hear wheelhouse and there is no ship in sight, this is almost certainly the meaning. British speakers understand it but use it less.

組成wheel（這裡指船舵、舵輪）+ house（房子、小屋）。Both halves are old English words: wheel from Old English hwēol, house from Old English hūs. Put together, it is simply "the little house where the steering wheel is". The "my strong area" meaning grew out of baseball, and the baseball sense itself borrowed the picture of the ship being controlled from the wheelhouse.

同家族的字

  • wheelthe same wheel — here the ship's steering wheel
  • housethe same house, from Old English hūs
  • warehousesame house as the second half of a compound
  • lighthousesame pattern: noun + house, a building at sea
  • greenhousesame house in a compound
  • husbandthe hūs 'house' element survives in it — a house-dweller

原始詞典資料9 筆記錄

以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。

Wheelhousename

  • 1

    A surname.

wheelhousenoun/ˈwiːlˌhaʊs/

  • 1

    A building or other structure containing a (large) wheel, such as the water wheel of a mill.

    • A machine with two pair of moulds only, will make from fifty to seventy thousand bricks per week. But if the regular market be large, it can, by using a steam machine of 10 horse power, work sixteen moulds, (four on each side of the wheel house,) and make two hundred thousand bricks per week.
    • The mill was driven by an overshot wheel twenty-seven and a half feet in diameter, placed in a separate wheel-house, built of stone, between the mill and a bank thirty feet high, upon which the water was brought by a canal.
  • 2

    A building or other structure containing a (large) wheel, such as the water wheel of a mill.

    • This invention relates to an improved device for hanging the body of carriages having a so-called "cut-under" or wheel-house, such as a common rockaway, extension-top phaeton, coupé-rockaway, &c., [...]
    • To install a new outer wheelhouse in a convertible, measure (at 1-in. intervals) the distance from the reinforcement that runs along the top of the old wheelhouse to the flange where the inner and outer wheelhouses are joined. Then transfer these measurements onto the new wheelhouse.
  • 3

    A building or other structure containing a (large) wheel, such as the water wheel of a mill.

    • Captain Waterman was on the wheel-house at the time of the explosion, attending to the landing of passengers from the small boat. He noticed a movement over the boilers, and immediately jumped or was thrown upon the forward deck. He was somewhat bruised, but not seriously injured.
    • The wheel-house is a small room or closet, with windows in front, built on the deck, in the forward part of the boat, where the helmsman stands to steer. The windows in the front of the wheel-house are for him to look out, and see where he is going. [...] There is a large wheel in this place, which is the reason why they call it the wheel-house. The wheel has handles to it, all around, for the man to take hold of, to turn the wheel one way or the other.
  • 4

    A building or other structure containing a (large) wheel, such as the water wheel of a mill.

    • PLATE XXVII.—Details of the Paddle Wheel of the Steamboat "North America." Fig. 1, shows the outside framing of the paddle-box, or as it is frequently termed, the wheel-house; also an elevation of the paddle-wheel, shewing the arrangement of the buckets, arms, centre-plate, &c.
    • These little rooms have each a half glass door, which opens on a gallery running all round the boat, with only the interruption of the wheel-houses, outside of which is a door of Venetian blinds, which being thrown open, you can sit in your room and see every object on one side of the river.
  • 5

    archaeologyhistoryhuman-sciencesA prehistoric structure from the Iron Age found in Scotland, characteristically including an outer wall within which a circle of stone piers (resembling the spokes of a wheel) form the basis for lintel arches supporting corbelled roofing with a hearth at the hub.

    • Most Celtic houses in Britain were simply constructed. They were generally round as in the remains of the house at Little Woodbury in Wiltshire, the wheelhouse at Jarlshof in Shetland, or the house on an unenclosed platform at Greenknowe in Berwickshire. [...] The roof of the Greenknowe house was conical. It had rafters fanning outwards from a high top, like the spokes of an umbrella. You can see why it is called a wheelhouse. The rafters were held at their lower ends on a horizontal ring of timber that rested on vertical posts with Y-shaped tops.
    • Ancestors of the historical Picts can be credited with the structural form of the wheelhouse with its western and northern affinities, and with the souterrain, and distribution and function of which is becoming clearer, but which may now be thought to have persisted in evolved form until the middle part of the first millennium AD [...].
  • 6

    ball-gamesbaseballgamesA pitch location which is favourable to the hitter.

    • The pitch was right in his wheelhouse, and he hit a grand slam.
    • The ball was up in my wheelhouse, and I got round on it, got the meat of that Ritchie Ashburn bottle bat solidly on the ball. I'll never in my life hit a ball any better.
  • 7

    A person's area of authority or expertise.

    • Horse viruses are in Pat’s wheelhouse.
    • Turning out terrific subordinates was not in her wheelhouse. [...] But she did so, mostly by force of will and with a number of false starts and midcourse corrections, and went on to become an icon in her industry.
  • 8

    A set of skills necessitated by a situation.

    • Ever since I started taking antipsychotics, managing my mental health has been a whole different wheelhouse.

摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。