Crossword clues for rowel
rowel
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Rowel \Row"el\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Roweledor Rowelled; p.
pr. & vb. n. Roweling or Rowelling.] (Far.)
To insert a rowel, or roll of hair or silk, into (as the
flesh of a horse).
--Mortimer.
Rowel \Row"el\, n. [OF. roele, rouele, properly, a little wheel, F. rouelle collop, slice, LL. rotella a little wheel, dim. of L. rota a wheel. See Roll, and cf. Rota.]
-
The little wheel of a spur, with sharp points.
With sounding whip, and rowels dyed in blood.
--Cowper. -
A little flat ring or wheel on horses' bits.
The iron rowels into frothy foam he bit.
--Spenser. (Far.) A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of horses, answering to a seton in human surgery.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"pointed wheel on a spur," mid-14c., from Old French roelle, roel (Modern French rouelle), "small wheel" (see roulette).
Wiktionary
n. 1 The small spiked wheel on the end of a spur. 2 A little flat ring or wheel on a horse's bit. 3 A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery. vb. 1 (context transitive English) To use a rowel on something, especially to drain fluid. 2 (context transitive English) To incite, to goad.
WordNet
Usage examples of "rowel".
Indio, mestizo, and africano vaqueros wore spurs as well, but they favored working rowels of honed iron.
There must have been at least twenty cavalrymen rowelling their horses down the cart track.
Rowels and quirts were plied with energy and will, as we tore down the river-bank, making a gradual circle until the second bottoms were reached, outriding the flood by a close margin.
Halfway up it, Johnny sees the broken-off rowel of some rangehand's spur glinting in the moonlight.
His projected article, his promise to Blix, all the jollity of the afternoon, all thought of time or place, faded away as the one indomitable, evil passion of the man leaped into life within him, and lashed and roweled him with excitement.
In front of Happy Jack's saloon, a guy with drooping handlebar mustaches, who wore an outlandish getup that consisted of low-slung Mexican sombrero, red silk scarf, black leather chaps, black cotton shirt, black work pants tucked into black, tooled-leather boots, and absurdly roweled silver spurs, was staggering into the crowd, bawling at the top of his lungs.
His boots were run down at the heel, but he wore jingling spurs with huge rowels, California spurs.
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 and the riders quirting them on into the sun where the shapes of the women rising up from their tasks stood flat and rigid in silhouette for a moment before they could quite believe in the reality of that dusty pandemoniac pounding down upon them.
The riders looked off down into that calamitous gulf and they looked at each other but they required no conference and they pulled the mouths of the horses about and roweled them on down the mountain.
The horses cantered nervously and if the riders roweled an occasional hand clutching at the trappings of their mounts those hands withdrew in silence.
Nodding, the messenger dashed to his unicorn, sprang aboard, roweled it with his spurs, and went off like a crossbow quarrel.
His deeply roweled silver spurs jangled unevenly as he staggered along and his Mexican sombrero lay canted crookedly down over his face, adding to his air of disconsolate drunkenness.
Ramonda whirled from the window where she had watched so expectantly and stared in roweling disappointment as the one she had hoped to see fleeing on the street below was hauled back into the room.
His horse, like Sharpe's, had been slowed by the plough furrows in the rye field, but the Frenchman rowelled it on as he got close to Sharpe.
Lord John savagely rowelled the beast, and somehow it lumbered and scraped its way over the thorns.