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Wiktionary:Word of the day/2024/December 17

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Word of the day
for December 17
Wheel of Fortune proper n
  1. (mythology, philosophy) The mythological wheel turned randomly by Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fate, fortune, and luck, to determine people's fortunes which were thus unpredictable.
  2. (by extension)
    1. (gambling) Synonym of Big Six wheel (“a game of chance consisting of a vertically mounted wheel divided into equal marked sectors; the winning sector is the one indicated by a pointer when the wheel stops turning”)
    3. (tarot) A tarot card with an image of Fortuna's wheel (sense 1), generally the tenth of 22 trumps of the major arcana in most tarot decks.

The American novelist John Kennedy Toole was born on this day in 1937. In his book A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the protagonist Ignatius Reilly repeatedly refers to the Roman goddess Fortuna having spun him downwards on her Wheel of Fortune.

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