callower
callower is the comparative form of callow.
Meaning of callow
Adjective
callow (comparative callower or more callow, superlative callowest or most callow)
- Immature, inexperienced, or naive.
- Through both the volumes, there is not a single original sentiment, description, or incident, and yet a callow reader may peruse it without perceiving any thing is wanting.1764, A Society of GENTLEMEN, THE CRITICAL REVIEW or Annals of Literature, volume the Seventeenth, London, page 487
- Having no hair; bald, bare, hairless.
- Then there was a little Chinese in full azure costume, with long gesticulating arms, and large callow head, who pertinaciously threw in his squeaky plea for Confucius in the most unsyntactical French.1878, A[lfred] Egmont Hake, “Professeurs de Langues”, in Paris Originals, London: C[harles] Egan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC, page 25
- Of a brick: unburnt.
- Of a young bird, or (part of) its body: having not developed feathers yet; featherless, unfledged; hence, of other animals or their bodies: having no fur or hair; furless, hairless, unfurred.
- […] Calais and Zetes had no beard upon their chin, / They both were callow. But aſſone as haire did once begin / In likeneſſe of a yellow Downe upon their cheekes to ſprout, / Then (euen as comes to paſſe in Birdes) the feathers budded out / Togither on their pinyons too, and ſpreaded round about /...1567, Ovid, “The Sixt Booke”, in Arthur Golding, transl., The XV. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, Entytuled Metamorphosis, […], London: […] Willyam Seres […], →OCLC, folio 79, verso
- Lacking life experience; immature, inexperienced, naive; also, of or relating to something immature or inexperienced.
- Those three young men are particularly callow youths.
- In the life cycle of an animal: newly born or hatched; juvenile.
- a callow bee
Questions about callower
- What is callower the comparative form of?
- Callower is the comparative form of callow.
Words near callower in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: callower (page history and authors); callow (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: “callower.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/callower. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
