Bower

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A structure in a garden formed by weaving plants and branches offers shade, also refers to a historical private room for a man, and denotes the equipment used for handling anchors on vessels
2. This term signifies a trellised area in gardens filled with climbing flora, represents a male's secluded living space from earlier times, and is the term for gear utilized for managing ship anchors
3. A leafy shelter in a garden formed by climbing plants ; a secluded room once kept for a man’s solitude ; a device fitted to a ship for raising and lowering the anchor

Etymology: The garden "bower" and the word for a lady's private chamber are not quite the same word, though they share an ancestor. The older sense is the room. Old English "būr" meant a dwelling or inner room, and by Middle English it had come to mean a lady's private chamber in a great house, the place where women of rank retreated to sew and talk. That sense of a sheltered, enclosed space is what the garden arbour inherited, the leafy room formed by bent and interwoven branches. The garden sense grew from the verb "bow," in the sense of bending or curving, with the agent suffix "-er" added to it. A bower is therefore, roughly, a thing made by bending branches over. A related sense comes from "bough," the branch, and some have argued it reflects the same idea of leafy shelter. The nautical meaning, the equipment for handling anchors, comes from "bow," the front of a ship, which is where the anchor is worked.

Synonyms: arbor, alcove, nook, bowerette