We are about to broach the fraught saga of the Circle Line, but there is another Metropolitan spin-off that comes first, one that has always appealed to me by the baleful beauty of its name: the City Widened Lines or 'The Widened Lines' for short.2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, pages 51–52:
2
An incidental benefit or unexpected pay-off.
Space research often provides a spin-off for everyday technology.
3
A by-product.
4
Fiction, Literature, Media, Publishing A fictional work where the protagonist was introduced in a preceding work or at least shares the same setting, often in a different aspect.
"Frasier" was a spin-off from the sitcom "Cheers".
The Harry Potter spin-off prequel series Fantastic Beasts has been “parked” by Warner Bros, according to its director David Yates.2023 October 27, “Fantastic Beasts: JK Rowling franchise has been ‘parked’, director says”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
5
The formation of a subsidiary company that continues the operations of part of the parent company; the company so formed.
To create (something) as a by-product or a secondary derived work.
a line of merchandise spun off from a TV series
For example, an OS/2-based data manager might spin off a thread to sort a file or allow two files to be sorted at the same time, one using CPU time while the other is waiting for disk I/O.1987, PC Tech Journal, volume 5, page 23:
1 more example
Halks-Miller’s discovery fired the starting gun on the race to develop a diagnostic blood test. Illumina spun off a new company, Grail, to develop the test, raising more than $2bn from investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and the Chinese company Tencent.2023 May 17, Jamie Smyth, “Quick blood tests to spot cancer: will they help or harm patients?”, in Financial Times: