Word.ws English Dictionary

windlestraw

windlestraw noun: a grass used for making ropes or for plaiting, especially Apera spica-venti.

Noun

windlestraw (countable and uncountable, plural windlestraws)

  1. (Scotland, UK, dialectal) A grass used for making ropes or for plaiting, especially Apera spica-venti.
    • Grey rocks did peep from the square moss, and stemmed / The struggling brook: tall spires of windlestrae / Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope, / And nought but gnarlèd roots of ancient pines, / Branchless and blasted, clenched with grasping roots / The unwilling soil.1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor

Forms of windlestraw

pluralwindlestraws
alternative formwindlestrae

Origin of windlestraw

From windle + straw.

Questions about windlestraw

What does windlestraw mean?
Windlestraw means a grass used for making ropes or for plaiting, especially Apera spica-venti.
What part of speech is windlestraw?
Windlestraw is a noun.
What is the plural of windlestraw?
The plural of windlestraw is windlestraws.

Words near windlestraw in the dictionary

  1. windlesses
  2. windlessly
  3. windlessness
  4. windlestrae
  5. windlestraes
  6. windlestraw
  7. windlestraws
  8. Windley
  9. Windleys
  10. windlike
  11. windline

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: windlestraw (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: “windlestraw.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/windlestraw. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.