Word.ws English Dictionary

collow

collow verb: to make foul or dirty; begrime as with the smut of coal; blacken.

Verb

collow (third-person singular simple present collows, present participle collowing, simple past and past participle collowed)

  1. (transitive) To make foul or dirty; begrime as with the smut of coal; blacken.

Noun

collow (uncountable)

  1. The black grime or soot of coal or burnt wood.

Forms of collow

third-person singular presentcollows
present participlecollowing
past participlecollowed
pastcollowed
alternative formkellow

Origin of collow

From Middle English *colwen, *colȝen (attested in colwed, colwinge), from Old English *colgian, from Proto-West Germanic *koligōn (“to make black as coal, blacken with coal”).

Questions about collow

What does collow mean?
Collow means to make foul or dirty; begrime as with the smut of coal; blacken.
What part of speech is collow?
Collow can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of collow?
The past tense of collow is collowed.

Words near collow in the dictionary

  1. collotype
  2. collotypes
  3. collotypic
  4. collour
  5. collours
  6. collow
  7. colloxylin
  8. colloxyline
  9. colls
  10. colluctancy
  11. colluctation

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: collow (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: “collow.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/collow. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.