Definition of "wheeze"

If the air smelled even faintly of dog, Lionel coughed, wheezed and sneezed.

2001, Joyce Carol Oates, Middle Age: A Romance (Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 443)

Mrs. Hearty began to shake and wheeze with laughter, and Millie stood looking at Bindle.

1932, Herbert George Jenkins, Bindle Omnibus, page 408

He began to wheeze again, and tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks. Nate was laughing, too, infected by Check's contagious wheezing.

1973, Robert Boston, A Thorn for the Flesh, page 30

Elsie wheezed, laughter swelling her bosom.

1988, Elizabeth Oldfield, Beware of Married Men, page 47

The man wheezed, his laughter like an accordion whine.

1993, Richard S. Wheeler, The Two Medicine River, page 221

"Even the fish know it; they don't rise to the bait any more and the birds are scared - hear how they wheeze and cry as they seek the land."

1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 184

One boy in a black tuxedo and red shoes plays a wheezing accordion like a roadside undertaker.

2009, J. P. White, Every Boat Turns South, page 112

Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze.

1922 February, James Joyce, “[V]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […]

The main point of fuel duty, though, is as a fiscal wheeze: it made up 5% of the tax take in 2010.

2011 November 19, “Road rage; High petrol prices hurt, but will not throttle the economy”, in The Economist‎

The Constitution cult in the US—deliberately stoked in the early twentieth century in a part as a bulwark against socialism—is a nastily brilliant wheeze by capitalism's apologists.

2022, China Miéville, chapter 4, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto

At the same time I felt them fall over my brows — time to get a cut — the engine gave a final wheeze and died.

2016, Heather Hildenbrand, A Bet Worth Making‎