Owl

How to spell owl

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce owl

What does owl mean?

1. nounA nocturnal bird of prey with large forward-facing eyes, a flat face, and a hooting call.

Owl in a sentence

• A tawny owl called from the woods behind the cottage all night.

• The children watched a barn owl glide silently across the field at dusk.

Where does owl come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Owl descends from the Old English ule, the everyday Anglo-Saxon name for the nocturnal bird of prey. It belongs to a wide Germanic family that includes the Dutch uil and the German Eule, all thought to have grown out of an imitation of the bird's hooting call, so the word is essentially an ancient piece of sound-mimicry. The modern spelling settled with the 'ow' digraph during the Middle English period, when the vowel shifted toward the diphthong we still hear today. Because the word is so short and the 'ow' spelling matches the sound directly, it has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years. Its long association with night and watchfulness later gave English the idea of a wise old owl, though the original name carried no such flattery.

How the word is built

• owl (a single root from Old English ule, with no prefix or suffix)