Billow
name, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A large wave, swell, surge, or undulating mass of something, such as water, smoke, fabric or sound
"[…] Whom the winds waft where'er the billows roll, / From the world's girdle to the frozen pole;"
- 2 a large sea wave wordnet
- 1 To surge or roll in billows.
"During the preceding afternoon a heavy North Pacific fog had blown in … Scudding eastward from the ocean, it had crept up and over the redwood-studded crests of the Coast Range mountains, […], billowing steadily eastward, it had rolled up the western slopes of the Siskiyou Range, […]"
- 2 become inflated wordnet
- 3 To swell out or bulge.
"Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers her father had recently brought her from Atlanta."
- 4 rise and move, as in waves or billows wordnet
- 5 rise up as if in waves wordnet
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- 6 move with great difficulty wordnet
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"One, that bore / the brave Orontes and his Lycian crew, / full in AEneas' sight a toppling wave o'erthrew. / Dashed from the tiller, down the pilot rolled. / Thrice round the billow whirled her, as she lay, / then whelmed below."
Etymology
From Middle English *bilwe, borrowed from Old Norse bylgja, from Proto-Germanic *bulgijō. Cognates include Danish bølge (“wave”); Norwegian Bokmål bølge (“wave”), Norwegian Nynorsk bylgje (“wave”); Swedish bölja (“wave”); German Low German Bulge, Bulg, Bülg (“billow, wave”); German Bulge (“billow, wave”). Compare bellow, bawl.
Probably a variant of Bellow or Bellew.
Related phrases
More for "billow"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.