Word.ws English Dictionary

dhow

/daʊ/

dhow noun: a traditional sailing vessel used along the coasts of Arabia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, generally having a single mast and a lateen sail.

dhow: a traditional sailing vessel used along the coasts of Arabia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean,...
Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

dhow (plural dhows)

  1. A traditional sailing vessel used along the coasts of Arabia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, generally having a single mast and a lateen sail.
    • I suppose I must have slept for seven or eight hours, getting the first real rest that I had had since the night before the loss of the dhow, for when I woke the sun was high in the heavens.1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
    • Joshua continued preparing breakfast, Bijan returned to piloting the dhow offshore and Pourghasem returned to his watch.[…]Several dhows were on the water and some fishermen were already at work.2001, David M Besaw, Joshua, Trafford Publishing, page 251

Examples of dhow in a sentence

  • The navy sometimes hired dhows for its patrols.[…]If a dhow was stopped, the slaves could not be counted on to make their presence known, having probably been told that the Europeans would kill them.2003, Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem, Rowman & Littlefield (AltaMira), page 78:
  • They took a dhow from Mombasa bound for Aden and planned to take a larger vessel to Suez and then overland to Cairo.2011, J. W. Heldring, The Killing of Dr. Albrecht Roscher, Xlibris, page 109:

Forms of dhow

pluraldhows

Origin of dhow

From Arabic دَاو (dāw).

Words that rhyme with dhow

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about dhow

What does dhow mean?
Dhow means a traditional sailing vessel used along the coasts of Arabia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean, generally having a single mast and a lateen sail.
How do you use dhow in a sentence?
The navy sometimes hired dhows for its patrols.[…]If a dhow was stopped, the slaves could not be counted on to make their presence known, having probably been told that the Europeans would kill them.
What part of speech is dhow?
Dhow is a noun.
How do you pronounce dhow?
Dhow is pronounced /daʊ/.
What is the plural of dhow?
The plural of dhow is dhows.

Words near dhow in the dictionary

  1. dhotied
  2. dhoties
  3. dhotis
  4. dhoty
  5. dhourra
  6. dhow
  7. dhows
  8. DHP
  9. DHPA
  10. DHPG
  11. DHPR

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dhow (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-dhow.wav.

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