bowl

UK/bəʊl/US/boʊl/

nounA14 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,430 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: bowls, bowled, bowling

A bowl is a round dish, deeper than a plate and open at the top. Cereal in the morning, soup at lunch, the big one you tip the salad into and never quite finish.

The shape carries the word a long way: the bowl of a spoon, a toilet bowl, a town sitting in a bowl of hills, and a stadium built as one wide dish, which is where the Super Bowl gets its name. Bowl is a verb too, and in Britain it belongs to cricket — the bowler bowls, the batter tries to hit it, and a good ball can bowl him out. Ten-pin bowling is the other game the word runs. Bowl somebody over and you have either knocked them flat or amazed them so completely they cannot speak.

Definitions of bowl

1nounbowlA round, deep dish, open at the top.A1~45%
“He filled a bowl with soup.”
- Said"Pass me a bowl, would you? I'll have mine with milk."
- WrittenShe set three bowls on the table and filled each with rice and steam.
- UsedServe the soup in warm bowls so it stays hot to the last spoonful.
- ContrastA bowl, not a dish. A dish is flat and wide; a bowl is deep enough to hold liquid. dish →
- Not thisYou do not eat a steak from a bowl. Anything you cut goes on a plate.
Patterna bowl of + noun (soup, rice, cereal) · a mixing / salad bowl · a bowlful
synonyms: dish, basin
2nounhollowThe round hollow part of something.B1~2%
“The bowl of the old spoon had worn thin.”
3verbcricketIn cricket, to send the ball down the pitch at the batter.B2~2%
“She bowled the last six balls of the match.”
4verbrollTo roll a heavy ball at pins in the game of bowling.B1~51%
“We bowled two games and walked home.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 161 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (142 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

bowl is a dish.

Remember it

bOwl → the O is the bowl seen from above

Look at the o in the middle: round and open, a bowl seen from above, waiting for soup.

Phrases it lives in

bowl someone over — knock them off their feet, or amaze them completely

Where it comes from

Two round things met in one spelling. The dish is Old English bolla, from a Germanic word, *bullǭ, that meant ball, round vessel and bowl all at once. The bowl you roll came the other way, in from Old French boule, a ball, from Latin bulla, a bubble or a round stud. Whichever one you mean, the word is saying round.

Proto-Indo-European
*bʰel-
Proto-Germanic
*bullǭ — ball, round vessel, bowl
Proto-West Germanic
*bollā
Old English
bolla
Middle English
bolle
English, today
bowl

Built from

bolle · Old English — bowl, cup, pot, beaker, measure

From Middle English bolle, from Old English bolla, bolle (“bowl, cup, pot, beaker, measure”), from Proto-West Germanic bollā, from Proto-Germanic bullǭ (“ball, round vessel, bowl”). Cognate with frr bol (“bun, bread roll”), Middle Low German bolle, bole (“round object”), Dutch bol (“ball, sphere, scoop, dot”), German Bolle (“bulb”), Danish bolle (“bowl, bread roll”), Icelandic bolli (“cup”). a doublet of boule and pulla.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen, A Man Called Ove, Containers & Packaging

First appears in chapter 6 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

bowl in the wild

Flush particles rapidly rise out of the bowl and several feet into the air after flushing.
Toilet plume
"Iron rice bowl" is a Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security, similar to life tenure.
Iron rice bowl
Yankovic also mentions wanting to go bowling with gangsters.
White & Nerdy
The Tokyo Bowl is an annual American college football bowl game, usually played in December in Tokyo, Japan.
Tokyo Bowl
An exception is his very early "bowl T 212" at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Ferrara, with exterior images by the Splanchnoptes Painter.
Penthesilea Painter

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the bolla family

bowl

bowl — used about once every 156 pages · #1,430 · point at the bar for the others

Definitions of bowl

1nounbowlA round, deep dish, open at the top.A1~45%

“He filled a bowl with soup.”

Said"Pass me a bowl, would you? I'll have mine with milk."
WrittenShe set three bowls on the table and filled each with rice and steam.
UsedServe the soup in warm bowls so it stays hot to the last spoonful.
ContrastA bowl, not a dish. A dish is flat and wide; a bowl is deep enough to hold liquid. dish →
Not thisYou do not eat a steak from a bowl. Anything you cut goes on a plate.

Patterna bowl of + noun (soup, rice, cereal) · a mixing / salad bowl · a bowlful

synonyms: dish, basin

2nounhollowThe round hollow part of something.B1~2%

“The bowl of the old spoon had worn thin.”

3verbcricketIn cricket, to send the ball down the pitch at the batter.B2~2%

“She bowled the last six balls of the match.”

4verbrollTo roll a heavy ball at pins in the game of bowling.B1~51%

“We bowled two games and walked home.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 161 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense (142 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

bowl is a dish.