Word.ws English Dictionary

gairfowl

gairfowl is the obsolete form of garefowl.

Meaning of garefowl

Noun

garefowl (plural garefowls)

  1. The great auk.
    • The Faroese men were able to catch more than a dozen gare-fowl along with 200 guillemots and numerous gannets, collecting them from rocks which the Icelanders were not brave enough to climb.2020, Tim Ecott, The Land of Maybe, Short Books, published 2021, page 81
  2. (archaic, rare) The razorbill

Forms of gairfowl

pluralgairfowls

Questions about gairfowl

What is gairfowl the obsolete form of?
Gairfowl is the obsolete form of garefowl.

Words near gairfowl in the dictionary

  1. gainwords
  2. gainworthy
  3. Gainza
  4. Gair
  5. gairaigo
  6. gairfowl
  7. gairfowls
  8. Gairloch
  9. Gairn
  10. Gairville
  11. Gais

Source and license

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