rowel

noun

1. A small spiked wheel on the end of a spur of certain types.

   “I / Perceive 'tis an advantage for a man to vvear ſpurres, / The rovvell of Knight-hood does gingle in the eare of their / Vnderſtanding.”

   “The deep and sharp rowels with which Ivanhoe’s heels were now armed, began to make the worthy Prior repent of his courtesy,[…].”

   “The dry desert of my native land, her men grey and gaunt, their spines twisted, their feet shod with rowel and spur.”

   “The Lone Ranger will storm in at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the stallion’s white hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from a tree limb by a broken neck.”

   “He nodded at the Americans. Buena suerte, he said. He put the long rowels of his spurs to the horse and they moved on.”

2. A little flat ring or wheel on a horse's bit.

   “The iron rowels into frothy foam he bit.”

3. A roll of hair, silk, etc., passed through the flesh of a horse in the manner of a seton in human surgery.

verb

1. (transitive)To use a rowel on (something), especially to drain fluid.
2. (transitive)To fit with spurs.
3. (transitive)To apply the spur to.

   “to rowel a horse”

   “When the first dogs barked Glanton roweled his horse forward and they came out of the trees and across the dry scrub with the long necks of the horses leaning out of the dust avid as hounds […].”

4. (figuratively, transitive)To incite; to goad.

   “He would have been completely ignorant of what was going on if Frank, periodically roweled by the viciously anti-labor stand of the Pittsburgh newspapers, hadn't felt the need of an audience.”