Word.ws English Dictionary

cowans

cowans is the plural of cowan.

Meaning of cowan

Noun (1)

cowan (plural cowans or (obsolete) cowanis)

  1. A worker in unmortared stone; a stonemason who has not served an apprenticeship.
  2. A person who attempts to pass himself off as a Freemason without having experienced the rituals or going through the degrees.
  3. (slang) A sneak; an inquisitive or prying person.
  4. (attributive) Uninitiated, outside, “profane”.

Noun (2)

cowan (plural cowans)

  1. (Scotland, obsolete, rare) A fishing-boat.

See all 14 meanings of cowan

Proper noun capitalized: Cowans

Cowans (plural Cowanses)

  1. A surname from Scottish Gaelic.

Forms of cowans

pluralCowanses

Origin of cowans

Variant of Cowan, with redundant English patronymic -s.

Questions about cowans

What does cowans mean?
Cowans means a surname from Scottish Gaelic.
What is cowans the plural of?
Cowans is the plural of cowan.
What part of speech is cowans?
Cowans is a proper noun.

Words near cowans in the dictionary

  1. cowals
  2. cowan
  3. Cowan Bridge
  4. Cowangie
  5. cowanis
  6. cowans
  7. Cowanses
  8. Cowanshannock
  9. cowanyoung
  10. coward
  11. coward's castle

Source and license

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