colour wheel

noun — 2 senses

colour wheel

noun
1

UK A planar circular chart in which related colours are adjacent, and complementary colors are opposite.

2

A device that emits varying colours of light by the use of a wheel, commonly used to illuminate Christmas trees.

  • With fears that draping normal Christmas fairy lights through the tree's aluminium branches would cause a short circuit, the trees were lit from below by a rotating colour wheel divided into wedge-shaped segments of variously coloured plastic.2013, Martin Pullen, The Completely Useless Guide to Christmas:
  • The twins led him across the room to a silver aluminum Christmas tree in the far corner. A device on the floor cast light on the tree from a bulb behind a slowly turning color wheel.2013, Robert Jeschonek, Christmas at Glosser's, page 13:
Related terms
colour triangle

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.