rowel

Etymology

From Middle English rowel, rowell, rowelle, from Old French roel, roiele (compare modern French rouelle), from Late Latin rotella, diminutive of Latin rota (“wheel”). Doublet of rotella.

noun

1. The small spiked wheel on the end of a spur.
   The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe’s heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy,[…]. 1819, Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”, in The Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott, volume 3, published 1833, page 121
   The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur. 1939, Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, page 246
   The Lone Ranger will storm in at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the stallion’s white hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from a tree limb by a broken neck. 1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, published 2013, page 892
   He nodded at the Americans. Buena suerte, he said. He put the long rowels of his spurs to the horse and they moved on. 1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, page 62
2. A little flat ring or wheel on a horse's bit.
   1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 1: Knight of the Red Cross, 1850, Edmund Spenser's Knight of the Red Cross; or Holiness, page 74, The iron rowels into frothy foam he bit.
3. A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery.

verb

1. (transitive) To use a rowel on (something), especially to drain fluid.
2. (transitive) To fit with spurs.
3. (transitive) To apply the spur to.
   to rowel a horse
4. (transitive, figurative) To incite; to goad.
   He would have been completely ignorant of what was going on if Frank, periodically roweled by the viciously anti-labor stand of the Pittsburgh newspapers, hadn't felt the need of an audience. 1941, Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace, page 240