Word.ws English Dictionary

dowd

/daʊd/

dowd noun: a dowdy person, especially a woman; a frump.

Noun

dowd (plural dowds)

  1. (archaic) A dowdy person, especially a woman; a frump.
    • “I knew there were women-dowdies in Bengal. They come up here sometimes. But I didn't know that there were men-dowds, too.”1889, Rudyard Kipling, “The Education of Otis Yeere”, in Under the Deodars, Boston: The Greenock Press, published 1899, page 29
    • He, of course, was only an unbalanced religious fanatic, whose opinions were not of the slightest consequence to anybody, whom everybody seemed to take a dislike to at sight (except ignorant paupers like the Cooneys), and whose ideal type of girl would probably be some hideous dowd, a slum-worker...1913, Henry Sydnor Harrison, chapter XI, in V. V.'s Eyes
  2. Any of various European moths of the genus Blastobasis.

Proper noun capitalized: Dowd

Dowd (plural Dowds)

  1. A surname from Irish.

Examples of dowd in a sentence

  • "You wouldn't have me a dowd, Olaf?" said she, demurely.1915, James Branch Cabell, chapter II, in The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck:
  • I feel—at home I feel as if I look quite nice; but when I come out of it"—she indicated her surroundings—"I realise I'm just a dowd who's fast losing what looks she had.1920, May Edginton, chapter XVI, in Married Life, or The True Romance:

Forms of dowd

Noun
pluraldowds
Proper noun
pluralDowds
alternative formDawdy
alternative formDowdy

Plural of dowd: dowds

Origin of dowd

Back-formation from dowdy.

Reduced Anglicized form of Irish Ó Dubhda (“descendant of Dubhda”), a byname derived from dubh (“black”).

Words that rhyme with dowd

20 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about dowd

What does dowd mean?
Dowd means a dowdy person, especially a woman; a frump.
How do you use dowd in a sentence?
"You wouldn't have me a dowd, Olaf?" said she, demurely.
What part of speech is dowd?
Dowd can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce dowd?
Dowd is pronounced /daʊd/.
What is the plural of dowd?
The plural of dowd is dowds.

Words near dowd in the dictionary

  1. dowak
  2. dowar
  3. dowars
  4. Dowbiggin
  5. Dowbiggins
  6. dowd
  7. dowd cap
  8. Dowdall
  9. Dowdalls
  10. Dowdell
  11. Dowdells

Source and license

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