different between towel vs rowel

English

Etymology

From Middle English towayle, towel, towail, towaille, from Old French toaille (“towel”) (modern French touaille), from Frankish *þwahilu (“cloth”), from Proto-Germanic *þwahan? (“to wash”). Cognate with Old High German dwahila (“towel”) (modern dialectal German Zwehle), Dutch dwaal (“towel”), dweil (“mop”), Low German Dweel (“towel”), Old English þw?le (“band; ribbon; fillet”), Old English þw?an (“to wash”).

Pronunciation

• enPR: toul, tou??l
• IPA^(key): /ta?l/, /?ta?.?l/
• Rhymes: -a?l, -a??l

Noun

towel (plural towels)

1. A cloth used for wiping, especially one used for drying anything wet, as a person after a bath.

Hyponyms

• lavabo
• see also Derived terms below

Derived terms

Descendants

• ? Japanese: ??? (taoru)

Translations

Verb

towel (third-person singular simple present towels, present participle toweling or towelling, simple past and past participle toweled or towelled)

1. (transitive) To hit with a towel.
2. (transitive) To dry by using a towel.

   He got out of the shower and toweled himself dry.

3. (transitive) To block up (a door, etc.) with a towel, to conceal the fumes of a recreational drug.
4. (Britain, dialect, obsolete, transitive) To beat with a stick, or "oaken towel".

Derived terms

• towel off
• towel up
• untoweled, untowelled

Anagrams

• Towle, owlet

Middle English

Noun

towel

1. Alternative form of towayle

English

Etymology

From Middle English rowel, rowell, rowelle, from Old French roel, roiele (compare modern French rouelle), from Late Latin rotella, diminutive of Latin rota (“wheel”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /??o??l/
• Rhymes: -???l

Noun

rowel (plural rowels)

1. The small spiked wheel on the end of a spur.
   • 1819, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, 1833, The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott, Volume 3, 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, 2013, Gravity's Rainbow, 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.

Translations

Verb

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, figuratively) 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.

Translations

Anagrams

• Lower, lower, owler