Word.ws English Dictionary

bowsmen

bowsmen is the plural of bowsman.

Meaning of bowsman

Noun (1)

bowsman (plural bowsmen)

  1. A sailor who works in the bow of a vessel.
    • Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale's back.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “The Monkey-Rope”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC, pages 355–356

Noun (2)

bowsman (plural bowsmen)

  1. An archer.
    • Whether from natural ailment, or disease engendered by the place he dwelt in, his strength had for many months past ebbed away, till at last he could no longer take his axe from the ingle nook, nor his bow from its crocks over the chimney. The best axeman and best bowsman on Avon side had become...1864, Diary of George Dern; or, Jottings of a Year of Middle Life, London: T[homas] Cautley Newby, […], page 75

Questions about bowsmen

What is bowsmen the plural of?
Bowsmen is the plural of bowsman.

Words near bowsmen in the dictionary

  1. bowsing ken
  2. bowsing kens
  3. bowsing-ken
  4. bowsing-kens
  5. bowsman
  6. bowsmen
  7. bowsmith
  8. bowsmiths
  9. bowspring
  10. bowsprit
  11. bowsprits

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bowsmen (page history and authors); bowsman (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bowsmen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bowsmen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.