fowl
/faʊl/ noun, verb, adjective
Forms fowls fowling fowled fowler fowlest
- noun (archaic) Any bird.
- noun A bird hunted or kept for food, grouped into landfowl (order Galliformes), also called gamefowl, and waterfowl (order Anseriformes: ducks, geese, swans, etc.), which together form the clade Galloanserae.
- verb (intransitive) To hunt fowl. “We took our guns and went fowling.”
- verb (transitive) To use or traverse in pursuit of fowls.
- adjective (obsolete) foul
Synonyms
Etymology
From Middle English foul, foghel, fowel, fowele, from Old English fugol (“bird”), from Proto-West Germanic *fugl, from Proto-Germanic *fuglaz, dissimilated variant of *fluglaz (compare Old English flugol ‘fleeing’, Mercian fluglas heofun ‘birds of the air’), from *fleuganą (“to fly”). Cognate with West Frisian fûgel, Low German Vagel, Dutch vogel, German Vogel, Swedish fågel, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål, and Norwegian Nynorsk fugl. Doublet of voël. More at fly.
Webster’s 1913
- noun Any bird; esp., any large edible bird.
- noun Any domesticated bird used as food, as a hen, turkey, duck; in a more restricted sense, the common domestic cock or hen (Gallus domesticus). Barndoor fowl, or Barnyard fowl, a fowl that frequents the barnyard; the common domestic cock or hen.
- verb To catch or kill wild fowl, for game or food, as by shooting, or by decoys, nets, etc. Such persons as may lawfully hunt, fish, or fowl. Blackstone.
Etymology [OE. foul, fowel, foghel, fuhel, fugel, AS. fugol; akin to OS. fugal D. & G. vogel, OHG. fogal, Icel. & Dan. fugl, Sw. fogel, fågel, Goth. fugls; of unknown origin, possibly by loss of l, from the root of E. fly, or akin to E. fox, as being a tailed animal.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “fowl”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details