Word.ws English Dictionary

bowssen

/ˈbaʊsən/

bowssen verb: to dunk or immerse (into water, for remedial purposes).

Verb

bowssen (third-person singular simple present bowssens, present participle bowssening, simple past and past participle bowssened)

  1. (Cornwall, obsolete) To dunk or immerse (into water, for remedial purposes).
    • There were many bowssening places, for curing of mad men.1609, Richard Carew, “The Second Booke”, in The Survey of Cornwall, London: […] S[imon] S[tafford] for Iohn Iaggard, […], →OCLC, folio 123, recto

Forms of bowssen

third-person singular presentbowssens
present participlebowssening
past participlebowssened
pastbowssened

Origin of bowssen

Ultimately borrowed from Cornish beudhi or Breton beuziñ (“to drown”).

Questions about bowssen

What does bowssen mean?
Bowssen means to dunk or immerse (into water, for remedial purposes).
What part of speech is bowssen?
Bowssen is a verb.
How do you pronounce bowssen?
Bowssen is pronounced /ˈbaʊsən/.
What is the past tense of bowssen?
The past tense of bowssen is bowssened.

Words near bowssen in the dictionary

  1. bowsmiths
  2. bowspring
  3. bowsprit
  4. bowsprits
  5. bowspritted
  6. bowssen
  7. bowssened
  8. bowssening
  9. bowssens
  10. bowstave
  11. bowstaves

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bowssen (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.

Last updated:

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