Word.ws English Dictionary

rowel

/ˈɹoʊəl/

rowel noun: a small spiked wheel on the end of a spur of certain types.

rowel: a small spiked wheel on the end of a spur of certain types
Image: Pearson Scott Foresman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

rowel (plural rowels)

  1. A small spiked wheel on the end of a spur of certain types.
    • I / Perceive 'tis an advantage for a man to vvear ſpurres, / The rovvell of Knight-hood does gingle in the eare of their / Vnderſtanding.1632, Iames Shirley [i.e., James Shirley], Changes: Or, Love in a Maze. A Comedie, […], London: […] G. P. for William Cooke, […], →OCLC, Act I, page 3
    • The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe’s heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy,[…].1819 December 20 (indicated as 1820), Walter Scott, Ivanhoe; a Romance. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co....
  2. A little flat ring or wheel on a horse's bit.
    • The iron rowels into frothy foam he bit.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  3. A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery.

Verb

rowel (third-person singular simple present rowels, present participle (US) roweling or (UK) rowelling, simple past and past participle (US) roweled or (UK) rowelled)

  1. (transitive) To use a rowel on (something), especially to drain fluid.
  2. (transitive) To fit with spurs.
  3. (transitive) To apply the spur to.
    • to rowel a horse
    • When the first dogs barked Glanton roweled his horse forward and they came out of the trees and across the dry scrub with the long necks of the horses leaning out of the dust avid as hounds […].1985, Cormac McCarthy, chapter XIII, in Blood Meridian […] , →OCLC
  4. (figuratively, transitive) To incite; to goad.
    • He would have been completely ignorant of what was going on if Frank, periodically roweled by the viciously anti-labor stand of the Pittsburgh newspapers, hadn't felt the need of an audience.1941, Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace, page 240

rowel meaning in Tamil

rowel in Tamil

பரிமுடுக்கி

Examples of rowel in a sentence

  • The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur.1939, Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, page 246:
  • The Lone Ranger will storm in at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the stallion’s white hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from a tree limb by a broken neck.1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, 1st US edition, New York: Viking Press, →ISBN:
  • He put the long rowels of his spurs to the horse and they moved on.1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy; 1), New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →ISBN, page 62:

Forms of rowel

Noun
pluralrowels
alternative formrowell
Verb
third-person singular presentrowels
present participle USroweling
present participle UKrowelling
past participle USroweled
past USroweled
past participle UKrowelled
past UKrowelled

Origin of rowel

From Middle English rowel, rowell, rowelle, from Old French roel, roiele (compare modern French rouelle), from Late Latin rotella, diminutive of Latin rota (“wheel”). Doublet of rotella.

Words formed from rowel

Words that rhyme with rowel

Questions about rowel

What does rowel mean?
Rowel means a small spiked wheel on the end of a spur of certain types.
What is rowel in Tamil?
Rowel in Tamil is பரிமுடுக்கி. See Rowel meaning in Tamil.
How do you use rowel in a sentence?
The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur.
What part of speech is rowel?
Rowel can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce rowel?
Rowel is pronounced /ˈɹoʊəl/.
What is the plural of rowel?
The plural of rowel is rowels.

Words near rowel in the dictionary

  1. rowed
  2. rowed back
  3. rowed in the same boat
  4. rowed up
  5. roweite
  6. rowel
  7. rowel-head
  8. rowel-heads
  9. roweled
  10. roweling
  11. roweling-needle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rowel (page history and authors); rowel (Tamil Wiktionary) (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:

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

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