Beachball

noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·2 syllables ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Alternative spelling of beach ball. alt-of, alternative
  2. 2
    large and light ball; for play at the seaside wordnet
Verb
  1. 1
    To hang; to stop responding to user input; (used of Mac computers, where this is indicated by a spinning coloured cursor like a beach ball). intransitive, slang

    "Is Xcode “beachballing” forever on you when we try to open a project that was working fine the day before?"

Synonyms

All synonyms
beach ballbeach ball

Example

More examples

"“The Milky Way is a river of stars that don’t twinkle because there’s no air,” Drew said, and the Earth looks like a ‘blue beachball” with mountain ranges and continents flying by at high speed."

Etymology

From beach + ball.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.