rowel

• (obsolete) rowell

From 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.

• IPA^(key): /ˈɹoʊəl/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -əʊəl

rowel (plural rowels)

1. The small spiked wheel on the end of a spur.
   • 1819, Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”, in The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott, volume 3, published 1833, page 121:

     The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe’s heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy, […] .

   • 1939, Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, page 246:

     The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur.

   • 1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, published 2013, page 892:

     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.

   • 1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, page 62:

     He nodded at the Americans. Buena suerte, he said. He put the long rowels of his spurs to the horse and they moved on.

2. 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.

3. A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery.

• rowel-head

rowel (third-person singular simple present rowels, present participle (US) roweling or (UK) rowelling, simple past and past participle (US) roweled or (UK) 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.

   to rowel a horse

   • 1985, Cormac McCarthy, chapter XIII, in Blood Meridian […] , →OCLC:

     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 […] .

4. (transitive, figurative) To incite; to goad.
   • 1941, Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace, page 240:

     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.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Rudyard Kipling to this entry?)

• Lower, Worle, lower, owler