Word.ws English Dictionary

kowan

kowan is the obsolete spelling 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

Forms of kowan

pluralkowans

Questions about kowan

What is kowan the obsolete spelling of?
Kowan is the obsolete spelling of cowan.

Words near kowan in the dictionary

  1. Kowals
  2. Kowalski
  3. Kowalskis
  4. Kowalsky
  5. Kowalskys
  6. kowan
  7. kowans
  8. kowari
  9. kowaris
  10. Kowarski syndrome
  11. kowhai

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kowan (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.

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