COWL • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Cowl

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/kaʊl/ Listen

noun

Cowl n.

A monk's hood; usually attached to the gown. The name was also applied to the hood and garment together. "What differ more, you cry, than crown and cowl?"

A cowl-shaped cap, commonly turning with the wind, used to improve the draft of a chimney, ventilating shaft, etc.

A wire cap for the smokestack of a locomotive.

(aviation) A removable metal covering for an aircraft engine, providing streamlining to minimize wind resistance; also called cowling.

A covering for a chimney or other ventilating shaft functioning to increase the draft.

Cowl n. A vessel carried on a pole between two persons, for conveyance of water.

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Etymology of 'Cowl'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Cowl" Quotes from Famous Books

... voice that thrill'd her inmost soul: It breathed a blessing; utter'd soft a prayer. No need to look: and yet she look'd, and saw A hooded monk before the altar kneel, A graceful presence, tho' in sordid dress. And as she gazed the cowl slipp'd back and show'd (But dimly thro' the incense-perfumed cloud) A pure pale face, a golden tonsured head, And blue eyes raised to heaven. Then the truth Was there reveal'd to her that he had left The world to watch and pray ...

— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... Abbot, as the door closed on him; "too honest for our game, and too much an Englishman. That native spirit peeps beneath his cowl; a monk should have no country and no kin. Well, he will learn a trick or two in Spain, and I'll make sure they keep him there a while. Now for my letters," and he sat down at the rude ...

— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard

... alone on the jetty of an old-fashioned wharf at Wapping, looking down upon the silent deck of a schooner below. No smoke issued from the soot-stained cowl of the galley, and the fore-scuttle and the companion were both inhospitably closed. The quiet of evening was over everything, broken only by the whirr of the paddles of a passenger steamer as it passed carefully up the centre of the river, or the plash of a lighterman's huge sweep as he piloted ...

— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull-neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of ...

— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... cross. Most of these wreaths were formed of a sweet-scented grass, which the children loved to keep in their desks, intertwined with the plumes of the buckeye, the syringa, and the wood anemone, and here and there the master noticed the dark-blue cowl of the monkshood, or deadly aconite. There was something in the odd association of this noxious plant with these memorials which occasioned a painful sensation to the master deeper than his esthetic sense. One day, during a long walk, in crossing a wooded ridge he came upon Mliss in the heart ...

— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

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