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rowan

nounnounnounnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɹəʊ.ən//
  • United Kingdom//ˈɹaʊ.ən//
  • United States//ˈɹoʊ.ən//
  • United States//ˈɹaʊ.ən//
  • Scotland//ˈɹaʊ.ən//

Sorbus aucuparia, the European rowan.

noun

  1. 1

    Sorbus aucuparia, the European rowan.

    Among the pines grew rowans hung with scarlet berries, and bilberry bushes whose leaves would be fair game for white moth caterpillars in spring.

  2. 2

    Any of various small deciduous trees or shrubs of genus Sorbus, belonging to the rose family, with pinnate leaves, corymbs of white flowers, and usually with orange-red berries.

  3. 3

    obsoletewych-elm, Ulmus glabra.

Etymology

Originally Scots and northern English, from Middle English ron, rone, compare also Northern English raan, ran. At first referring to its fruits, of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse reynir. Also related to Norwegian Bokmål rogn, Danish røn. Ultimately related to the root of red.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of rowenAlternative form of rowen (“aftermath”).

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of rovingdatedDated form of roving (“an elongate bundle of fiber”).

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of rownarchaicAlternative form of rown (“fish-eggs”).

Forms

plural
rowans
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).