This idiom apparently dates back to the 1600s and refers to drawing out a thread by spinning [1].
“Amanda Holden plans on ‘spinning out’ Britain’s Got Talent judging role for a while yet”
“No doubt, this earns Mr Robbins lots of murmured compliments in the elevated circles in which he moves — ‘Well done, Olly, let’s spin it out a few more years, old boy’.”
“Three gigantic mutated animals against Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is not a fair fight, but director Brad Peyton spins it out for nearly two hours in Rampage, a film twice as preposterous as it is exhilarating, yet twice as exhilarating as any other movie you can think of in which a gorilla, a wolf and an alligator-armadillo hybrid attempt to flatten downtown Chicago.”
The term “spin out” (or “spin off”) is also used to describe the creation of a new company or other organisation from an existing one.
e.g. “Back in 2014, eBay revealed plans to spin out its payments business, PayPal, into a standalone company.”
We might also say that a vehicle or situation spins out of control.
e.g. “This caused the vehicle to spin out of control, colliding with a large hedge.”
[1] “spin out” In The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, by Christine Ammer. 2nd ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2013.
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