1. reel - Noun
2. reel - Verb
3. Reel - Proper noun
A lively dance of the Highlanders of Scotland; also, the music to the dance; -- often called Scotch reel.
A frame with radial arms, or a kind of spool, turning on an axis, on which yarn, threads, lines, or the like, are wound; as, a log reel, used by seamen; an angler's reel; a garden reel.
A machine on which yarn is wound and measured into lays and hanks, -- for cotton or linen it is fifty-four inches in circuit; for worsted, thirty inches.
A device consisting of radial arms with horizontal stats, connected with a harvesting machine, for holding the stalks of grain in position to be cut by the knives.
To roll.
To wind upon a reel, as yarn or thread.
To incline, in walking, from one side to the other; to stagger.
The act or motion of reeling or staggering; as, a drunken reel.
Source: Webster's dictionaryThe Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel. Eduard Hanslick
At first I felt dizzy - not with the kind of dizziness that makes the body reel but the kind that's like a dead emptiness in the brain, an instinctive awareness of the void. Fernando Pessoa
Was that really love? I saw all these passionate people reel about and drift haphazardly as if driven by a storm, the man filled with desire today, satiated on the morrow, loving fiercely and discarding brutally, sure of no affection and happy in no love... Hermann Hesse
We knew exactly what we wanted in each other. And even so, it ended. One day it stopped, as if the film simply slipped off the reel. Haruki Murakami
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. John Kennedy Toole
A man cannot spin and reel at the same time. Yiddish Proverb