Bowl

How to spell bowl

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bowl

What does bowl mean?

1. nounA round, deep dish used for holding food or liquid.
2. verbTo roll a ball along the ground, as in cricket or in lawn or tenpin games.

Bowl in a sentence

• noun

  She filled the bowl with cereal and cold milk.

• verb

  He can bowl a fast, swinging delivery to the batsman.

• noun

  The soup was served in a heavy ceramic bowl.

• verb

  The children took turns to bowl the heavy ball down the lane.

Where does bowl come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English bolla, which meant a round pot, cup, or vessel for holding liquid or food. That noun belonged to a wider Germanic family of words for rounded containers, and it is distantly related to words like 'boll' (the rounded seed pod of cotton) through the shared idea of something swollen or rounded. The sporting sense, a heavy rolling ball used in lawn games and later in tenpin alleys, developed separately from the Old French boule, meaning 'ball', which in turn traces back to the Latin bulla, 'a rounded knob or bubble'. Over time English merged the spelling of these strands into the single form 'bowl', so the same letters now cover both the dish on the table and the ball you roll down a lane. The silent-looking 'w' is the spelling trap: it represents the rounded vowel rather than a separate sound, and it is what keeps 'bowl' visually distinct from its near-twin 'bole', the trunk of a tree.

How the word is built

• bowl (from Old English bolla, a round vessel); single root, no affixes