Bowls

How to spell bowls

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bowls

What does bowls mean?

1. nounRound, open dishes used for holding food or liquid.
2. nounA lawn game in which weighted balls are rolled toward a target ball.
3. verbRolls or delivers a ball, as in cricket or tenpin lanes.

Bowls in a sentence

• noun

  She stacked the clean bowls on the top shelf of the cupboard.

• noun

  Every summer the retired neighbours play bowls on the village green.

• verb

  He bowls a fast delivery whenever the batsman looks settled.

• noun

  The caterer set out dozens of bowls for the soup course.

• noun

  The club hosts a weekly bowls tournament on its manicured rink.

• verb

  She bowls a strike almost every other frame at the alley.

Where does bowls come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This spelling actually packs together two separate histories that ended up looking identical. The 'dish' sense descends from the Old English bolla, a word for a round pot or drinking vessel, which belongs to the same Germanic family as the modern words 'boll' and the swelling shape of a bubble. The 'rolling ball' sense, by contrast, came in from Old French boule, itself from the Latin bulla, meaning 'bubble' or 'rounded knob', and that French line gave English the lawn game and the cricketing verb 'to bowl'. By the late Middle Ages the two strands had converged on the same modern spelling, helped by the fact that both ideas centre on something round. The silent-feeling 'ow' that spells the long 'oh' sound is the usual trap here, since the word sounds nothing like 'cow' or 'now'. It also shares its sound with the unrelated words 'boles' (tree trunks) and 'bolls' (seed pods), so the eye has to settle the spelling, not the ear.

How the word is built

• bowl (round vessel / to roll a ball)
• -s (plural noun or third-person singular verb)