Rowelled

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Urged a horse forward by jabbing it with the pointed spiked wheel of a spur
2. Pricked a horse's flank with the toothed wheel fixed to a rider's spur
3. Goaded an animal onward using a spur fitted with a small serrated wheel

Etymology: The rowel is the small spiked wheel on a spur, the part that pricks a horse's flank when the rider kicks. "Rowelled" is simply the past tense of the verb meaning to prick a horse with such a wheel, so the story belongs to the noun. The noun came into Middle English from Old French "roel" or "roiele", which descends from Late Latin "rotella", a diminutive of Latin "rota", meaning "wheel". The word is therefore a little wheel, and the spur's spiked disc is exactly that. English also keeps a close relative of the same root. "Rotella" survives as a doublet, a second English word from the same source that arrived by a different route, and the two forms show how one Latin wheel-word split into separate English vocabulary.

Synonyms: spur, goad