Word.ws English Dictionary

colstaff

colstaff is the archaic spelling of cowlstaff.

Meaning of cowlstaff

Noun

cowlstaff (plural cowlstaffs or cowlstaves)

  1. A staff used to carry a cowl or other burden, especially held by two people on their shoulders.
    • [fight] performed by bastons, clubs and coulstaves1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “(please specify |book=I to XXXVII)”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C....

Forms of colstaff

pluralcolstaves

Questions about colstaff

What is colstaff the archaic spelling of?
Colstaff is the archaic spelling of cowlstaff.

Words near colstaff in the dictionary

  1. COLREGS
  2. Colridge
  3. cols
  4. cols.
  5. Colson
  6. colstaff
  7. colstaves
  8. Colsterworth
  9. Colston
  10. Colston Bassett
  11. Colstons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: colstaff (page history and authors); cowlstaff (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: “colstaff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/colstaff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.