Howl

How to spell howl

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce howl

What does howl mean?

1. verbTo make a long, loud, wailing cry, as a dog, wolf, or the wind does.
2. nounA long, loud, wailing cry or sound.

Howl in a sentence

• verb

  The dog would howl every time a siren passed the house.

• noun

  A lonely howl echoed across the valley after dark.

• verb

  The wind began to howl through the gaps in the old windows.

• noun

  The comedian's punchline drew a howl of laughter from the crowd.

Where does howl come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Howl arrived in English as the Middle English verb houlen, recorded from around the 1200s, and it is what linguists call an imitative or echoic word: its sound was meant to mirror the long, wailing cry it describes. It has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Dutch huilen and the German heulen, both of which mean to cry or wail loudly, and all of them seem to trace back to a shared imitative root that simply copied the noise of a wolf or a gusting wind. Over the centuries the spelling settled on the 'ow' vowel that we now hear, the same diphthong found in 'owl' and 'growl'. The word kept its raw, vocal meaning rather than drifting into abstraction, which is why it still feels so physical today. The main spelling trap is simply remembering the silent-looking 'w' in the 'ow' cluster rather than writing 'houl' or 'haul'.

How the word is built

• howl (a single imitative root; no prefix or suffix)