Word.ws English Dictionary

rowlocks

rowlocks is the plural of rowlock.

Meaning of rowlock

Noun

rowlock (plural rowlocks)

  1. (UK) A usually U-shaped pivot attached to the gunwale (outrigger in a sport boat) of a boat that supports and guides an oar, and provides a fulcrum for rowing; an oarlock.
    • I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over the water. I listened. Pretty soon I made it out. It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rowlocks when it's a still night.1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter VII, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    oarlock
  2. A brick, for example in a course of brickwork, that is laid vertically with its tallest but slimmest side facing down, and its shortest face facing the outside of the wall (oriented so that it is taller than it is wide).

Questions about rowlocks

What is rowlocks the plural of?
Rowlocks is the plural of rowlock.

Words near rowlocks in the dictionary

  1. rowling
  2. Rowlingesque
  3. Rowlingian
  4. Rowlinson
  5. rowlock
  6. rowlocks
  7. rowmate
  8. rowmates
  9. rowme
  10. rowmes
  11. rowmotion

Source and license

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