/ˈɹoʊəl/
OriginFrom 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.
- The small spiked wheel on the end of a spur.
“The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe’s heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy,[…].”
“The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur.”
“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.”
- A little flat ring or wheel on a horse's bit.
“1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 1: Knight of the Red Cross, 1850, Edmund Spenser's Knight of the Red Cross; or Holiness, page 74,
The iron rowels into frothy foam he bit.”
- A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery.
- transitiveTo use a rowel on (something), especially to drain fluid.
- transitiveTo fit with spurs.
- transitiveTo 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 […].”
- figuratively, transitiveTo 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.”
Formsrowels(plural) · rowell(alternative) · rowels(present, singular, third-person) · roweling(US, participle, present) · rowelling(UK, participle, present) · roweled(US, participle, past) · roweled(US, past) · rowelled(UK, participle, past) · rowelled(UK, past)