dowel
Americannoun
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dowels
plural
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Also called dowel pin. Carpentry. a pin, usually round, fitting into holes in two adjacent pieces to prevent their slipping or to align them.
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a piece of wood driven into a hole drilled in a masonry wall to receive nails, as for fastening woodwork.
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a round wooden rod of relatively small diameter.
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Dentistry. a peg, usually of metal, set into the root canal of a natural tooth to give additional support to an artificial crown.
verb (used with object)
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of dowel
1300–50; Middle English dowle < Middle Low German dovel plug; compare German Döbel, Dübel, Old High German tubili
Explanation
A dowel is a peg, usually made of wood, that fastens two objects together. A dowel might connect a shelf to a bracket, for example. Dowels are used in furniture making to hold different parts together, such as a table leg and a table top. A dowel usually works by fitting into a slot or hole in each of the two adjacent pieces. Elaborate cakes with many different tiers might have dowels hidden inside them, connecting each separate cake to the next. The word dowel is believed to stem from the same root as the Middle Low German dovel, "plug" or "tap."
Vocabulary lists containing dowel
Whirligig
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The Sword of Summer
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
By the time she folds it shut with a long wooden dowel, the flatbread is already bubbly and browned.
From Washington Times ● Apr. 21, 2023
Maintenance is easy, too: He just turns it with a rebar dowel and hoses it down when it's dry.
From Salon ● Aug. 18, 2022
No, a guy walks into a gallery, carrying a bar — a wooden dowel painted in bright stripes of color.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 11, 2022
The dowel and tapered pins are the most straightforward, consisting of a single piece.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 20, 2021
It’s funny, how you can go years seeing only what you choose to see, and picking your outrage like you pick out a slip, leaving all the others hanging on their slim mesarthium dowel.
From "Strange the Dreamer" by Laini Taylor
The first, Spherae, is a ball-shaped cushion supported by three polished wood dowels that slide through a brass disc and lock into place.
From New York Times ● Apr. 15, 2024
You can separately buy rings to attach to the ends of pins, which work best with dowels, as opposed to tapered styles.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 20, 2021
And they were loud, enthusiastically hitting empty buckets with wooden dowels, earning them the nickname the Bucket Brigade.
From Washington Post ● Mar. 16, 2020
It was the first house I had ever been in that did not have wardrobes, no three-piece set of veneered chipboard, that leaned precariously as the glue loosened in the dowels.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 6, 2020
The day I wandered into the coal shed looking for trouble I had the drum on my hip and two little dowels for drumsticks.
From "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez
Verdi Biographer Francis Toye. ¶ Its jackets are built with a doweled spine wide enough to carry lettering.
From Time Magazine Archive
A doweled joint is made by jointing the two edges carefully, boring holes opposite each other and inserting dowel pins when the two edges are glued together.
From Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
For example, in assembling framed pieces that are doweled, it is well to glue the dowels into one set of holes beforehand, making tenons of them, as it were.
From Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
The Finished Library Table The table top is made of several boards which are doweled and glued together.
From Mission Furniture How to Make It, Part 3 by H. H. (Henry Haven) Windsor
A doweled miter is one in which one or more dowels are inserted and glued into holes bored into the beveled edges.
From Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
The second section was brought up from Birmingham and was eventually put back together with the larger piece by a stone mason using copper tube doweling.
From BBC ● Oct. 5, 2022
The new supergrip glues have also been a boon to the basement Sheraton: they will hold wood joints together more durably than the most exquisite doweling.
From Time Magazine Archive
There is, to be sure, a prejudice against dowels on the part of cabinet-makers due, possibly, to the willingness to have it appear that doweling is a device of inferior mechanics.
From Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
The construction may be further strengthened by also doweling the end of this stretcher into the legs.
From Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
All these things went into colonial furniture, so beautifully cut, so carefully dowelled and put together, so well made, that many of the things have become heirlooms in the families for which they were constructed.
From Principles of Home Decoration With Practical Examples by Candace Wheeler
These pieces are fitted neatly to the proper size and dowelled firmly together.
From Mission Furniture How to Make It, Part I by H. H. (Henry Haven) Windsor
These instruments consist of two pieces of wood dowelled together with twenty holes that taper from 7/16 inch to 3/16 inch.
From Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology Smithsonian Studies in History and Technology, No. 17 by John T. Schlebecker
In this case the bottom is raised from the floor, and may be dadoed into the bottom rails, or dowelled into them or even supported by strips attached along their lower inside edges.
From Handwork in Wood by William Noyes
Water wylger ay wax, woneȝ þat stryede Water wildly ever waxed, abodes that destroyed, Hurled in-to vch hous, hent þat þer dowelled Hurled into each house, seized those that there dwelt.
From Early English Alliterative Poems in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century by Richard Morris
At present, mortising and dowelling have come to the front as proper processes, especially for table-building; and this time the style appears under the name of "Mission furniture."
From Principles of Home Decoration With Practical Examples by Candace Wheeler
The tools used in dowelling are: Brace, countersink, dowel-rounder, twist bit, try-square, marking-awl, and the usual bench tools.
From Woodwork Joints How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. by William Fairham
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
