- 1（貓、狗或人）長聲哀嚎、鬼叫；名詞：一聲長長的哀鳴。台灣人講貓在外面「哀哀叫」「叫春」就很接近。
To yowl is to make a long, loud, unhappy cry. The sound is drawn out — not a short bark or a quick shout, but a noise that goes on and rises and falls. Cats yowl at night. Dogs yowl when they are shut in a room alone. A person can yowl too, usually in pain, or in anger, or when singing very badly on purpose.
The key idea is that a yowl sounds miserable. A cheerful animal does not yowl. When you read that someone yowled, you already know something is wrong — they are hurt, upset, or complaining loudly.
It works as a verb (the cat yowled) and as a noun (a yowl came from under the house). It is not a formal word; you meet it in stories much more than in newspapers or reports. Compare the neighbours: howl is what a wolf or a dog does, a long clear cry into the air; wail is what a person does when very sad, and also what a does; whine is thinner, higher, and complaining. Yowl sits closest to the cat.
組成From Middle English youlen, from Old Norse gaula, meaning to bellow or howl. The first sound was probably pulled toward y- by the old English word yellen (to yell). Words like this often start as imitations of the noise itself.
同家族的字
- yellnot the same root, but yell (Middle English yellen) is what pulled yowl's spelling into a y-
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
yowlnoun/jaʊl/
- 1
A prolonged, loud cry, like the sound of an animal; a wail; a howl.
- “Before he was a twel’month ould he had a mouth full o’ great teeth; his hands wor like ’s claws, and his legs wor no thicker nor the handle of a whip, and about as straight as a rapin’ hook; to make the matther worse, he had the gut uv a cormorant, and the whinge, and the yelp, and the screech, and the yowl, was never out of his mouth.”
yowlverb/jaʊl/
- 1
Utter a yowl.
- 2
Express by yowling; utter with a yowl.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。