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fowl

Pronunciation: /faʊl/

The English word “fowl” has 5 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. Any bird.
  2. 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

  1. To hunt fowl.
  2. To use or traverse in pursuit of fowls.

adjective

  1. foul

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,…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.