☼ Concept Map

''caster'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260813235252-00-⌔

caster - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

🖼️ ➺ 🖼️ ➺

Noun

caster (plural casters)

  • Someone or something that casts.
    • ✤ a caster of spells
    • ✤ a caster of stones
    • ✤ a caster of bronze statuary
    • ✤ She’s never seen a hired man without Anna to command him. He’s eerie as a shadow without its caster.1
  • A wheeled assembly attached to a larger object at its base to facilitate rolling. A caster usually consists of a wheel (which may be plastic, a hard elastomer, or metal), an axle, a mounting provision (usually a stem, flange, or plate), and sometimes a swivel (which allows the caster to rotate for steering).
    • ✤ Synonym: casterwheel
    • ✤ Many office chairs roll on a set of casters.
    • ✤ I have my own phone, an electric typewriter and a lovely chair with casters. The floor is carpeted, the lighting is very adequate.2
  • A shaker with a perforated top for sprinkling condiments such as sugar, salt, pepper, etc.
    • ✤ Synonym: cruet
    • ✤ *a set of casters *
    • ✤ Your waiter having settled that point, returns to array your tablecloth, with a table napkin folded cocked-hat-wise (slowly, for something out of window engages his eye), a white wine-glass, a green wine-glass, a blue finger-glass, a tumbler, and a powerful field battery of fourteen casters with nothing in them; […]3
    • ✤ She could keep cool and collected while she collected your check, give you the correct change, win your heart, indicate the toothpick stand, and rate you to a quarter of a cent better than Bradstreet could to a thousand in less time than it takes to pepper an egg with one of Hinkle’s casters.4
  • A stand to hold a set of shakers or cruets.
    • ✤ Synonym: cruet
  • (automotive) The angle of the axis around which a car’s front wheels rotate when the steering wheel is turned, with a vertical axis being defined as zero caster.
    • ✤ In addition, caster helps to reduce steering effort and to return the steering wheel to the center position after a turn.5

Verb

caster (third-person singular simple present casters, present participle castering, simple past and past participle castered)

  • To act as a caster

Etymology

From cast +‎ -er; the wheel sense comes from obsolete cast (“to turn”).

Pronunciation

  • (UK, Australia, New Zealand) IPA: /ˈkɑːstə(ɹ)/, /ˈkæstə(ɹ)/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • (General American, Canada) IPA: /ˈkæstɚ/
  • Homophone: castor
  • Rhymes: -æstə(ɹ), -ɑːstə(ɹ)

Printed 2026-08-13.

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Footnotes

  1. 2016, C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Virago, page 231: ↩

  2. 1980 August 30, Nancy Walker, “My Boss Comes Out”, in Gay Community News, volume 8, number 6, page 7: ↩

  3. 1860 January 28 – October 13, Charles Dickens, chapter VI, in The Uncommercial Traveller, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1861, →OCLC: ↩

  4. 1910, O. Henry [pseudonym; William Sydney Porter], “The Girl and the Habit”, in Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC: ↩

  5. 2008, Ronald G Haefner, The Car Care Book ‎, →ISBN, page 238: ↩