Rowel

Definitions

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.

Equivalents

Examples

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

CEFR level