Definition of "rowel"

rowel

/ˈɹoʊəl/

noun
plural rowels
1. The small spiked wheel on the end of a spur.
  Quotations
  The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe’s heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy, […] .
  1819, Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”, in The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott, volume 3, published 1833, page 121
  The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur.
  1939, Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, page 246
  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.
  1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, published 2013, page 892
  He nodded at the Americans. Buena suerte, he said. He put the long rowels of his spurs to the horse and they moved on.
  1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, page 62
2. A little flat ring or wheel on a horse's bit.
  Quotations
  The iron rowels into frothy foam he 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
3. A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery.
verb
third-person singular simple present rowels, present participle roweling or rowelling, simple past and past participle roweled or rowelled
1. (transitive) To use a rowel on (something), especially to drain fluid.
2. (transitive) To fit with spurs.
3. (transitive) To apply the spur to.
4. (transitive, figurative) To incite; to goad.
  Quotations
  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.
  1941, Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace, page 240

Definition of "rowel"

rowel

noun

Quotations

Quotations

verb

Quotations