The outer rim of a wooden wheel, made of several curved pieces of wood joined together to form the circle.
From Old English 'felg' or 'felge,' related to Germanic words for 'joint' or 'band.' Medieval craftsmen used the word for the wooden segments that make up a wheel's circumference.
A wagon's felly was a precision-engineered piece of medieval technology—coopers had to bend wood just right so the pieces locked together under tension, creating wheels that rolled for decades.
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