Word.ws English Dictionary

yawl

/jɔːl/US/jɔl/

yawl noun: a small ship's boat, usually rowed by four or six oars.

yawl: a small ship's boat, usually rowed by four or six oars
Image: Tomasz Rojek, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

yawl (plural yawls)

  1. A small ship's boat, usually rowed by four or six oars.
  2. A fore-and-aft rigged sailing vessel with two masts, main and mizzen, the mizzen stepped abaft the rudder post.
    • The “Nellie,” a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 193

Verb

yawl (third-person singular simple present yawls, present participle yawling, simple past and past participle yawled)

  1. To cry out; to howl.
    • Something scraped slightly against the outer wall. But the night was full of wilder sounds, and in the house the furniture and the boards creaked and sprung between the yawling of the wind among the chimneys, the rattle of the thunder and the pelting of the rain.1914, Ernest Bramah, Max Carrados

yawl meaning in Tamil

yawl in Tamil

மீன்பிடிப் படகு

Forms of yawl

Noun
pluralyawls
Verb
third-person singular presentyawls
present participleyawling
past participleyawled
pastyawled

Origin of yawl

Apparently from Low German and Middle Low German jolle, or Dutch jol, possibly ultimately from a Proto-Germanic derivative of Proto-Indo-European *h₂ewlos (“tube”), see also Lithuanian aulas, Norwegian aul, Hittite [script needed] (auli-, “tube-shaped organ in the neck”), Albanian hollë, Latin alvus.

Imitative.

Words that rhyme with yawl

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about yawl

What does yawl mean?
Yawl means a small ship's boat, usually rowed by four or six oars.
What is yawl in Tamil?
Yawl in Tamil is மீன்பிடிப் படகு. See Yawl meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is yawl?
Yawl can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce yawl?
Yawl is pronounced /jɔːl/ (UK).
What is the plural of yawl?
The plural of yawl is yawls.

Words near yawl in the dictionary

  1. Yawhens
  2. yawing
  3. yawingly
  4. yawk
  5. yawker bird
  6. yawl
  7. yawled
  8. yawler
  9. yawlers
  10. yawless
  11. yawling

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yawl (page history and authors); yawl (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.

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

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