Word.ws English Dictionary

sowling

sowling is the present participle and gerund of sowl.

Meaning of sowl

Verb (1)

sowl (third-person singular simple present sowls, present participle sowling, simple past and past participle sowled)

  1. (transitive) To pull (especially an animal) by the ears; to drag about.
    • Hee'l go he ſayes, and ſole the Porter of Rome Gates by th'ears. He will mowe all downe before him, and leaue his paſſage poul'd.c. 1608–1609 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...

Verb (2)

sowl (third-person singular simple present sowls, present participle sowling, simple past and past participle sowled)

  1. (obsolete) To soil or stain; to dirty.
    Synonyms:
    sullow, sully, assoil, beclart, bedaub, bedirty, imbrue (especially with blood), bedizen, befile, befilth

See all 3 meanings of sowl

Noun

sowling (plural sowlings)

  1. (obsolete) A unit of land of 160 acres.
    • A sowling is 160 acres, Cheshire measure, equal to 335,7 statute acres.1814, Thomas Downs, An historical, topographical and descriptive account of the weald of Kent
    • Walter Fitz-Engilbert holds half a sowling and forty acres of land, and has in demesne a plough with seven bondsmen and five acres of meadow.1856, Samuel Joseph Mackie, A descriptive and historical account of Folkestone, page 340

Forms of sowling

pluralsowlings

Origin of sowling

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Questions about sowling

What does sowling mean?
Sowling means a unit of land of 160 acres.
What is sowling the present participle and gerund of?
Sowling is the present participle and gerund of sowl.
What part of speech is sowling?
Sowling is a noun.
What is the plural of sowling?
The plural of sowling is sowlings.

Words near sowling in the dictionary

  1. sowle
  2. sowled
  3. sowles
  4. Sowleses
  5. sowlike
  6. sowling
  7. sowlings
  8. sowls
  9. sowlth
  10. sowlths
  11. sowm

Source and license

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