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Rolex

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɹəʊlɛks//

A luxury wristwatch produced by the brand Rolex SA.

noun

  1. 1

    A luxury wristwatch produced by the brand Rolex SA.

    He pulled up his sleeve and there on his scrawny arm hung a Rolex the size of Big Ben.

Etymology

Coined ex nihilo by German watchmaker Hans Wilsdorf in 1908 as a trade name. Wildorf later explained: "I tried combining the letters of the alphabet in every possible way. This gave me some hundred names, but none of them felt quite right. One morning, while riding on the upper deck of a horse-drawn omnibus along Cheapside in the City of London, a genie whispered ‘Rolex’ in my ear."

Forms

plural
Rolexes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).