rowel

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)

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• 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 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.

   to rowel a horse

4. (transitive, figurative) To incite; to goad.

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

   • 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.

• Lower, Worle, lower, owler