bower

noun

1. A bedroom or private apartments, especially for a woman in a medieval castle.

   “Give me my lute in bed now as I lie, / And lock the doors of mine unlucky bower.”

   “Rosa refused to return to the lair of the raper, but was induced to give Tudy what his mother described as ‘his last bit of happiness’ in a bower hastily got ready at Montrose, the La Plante mansion on Greenock Heights.”

2. (literary)A dwelling; a picturesque country cottage, especially one that is used as a retreat.

   “While friends arrived in circles gay, To visit Damon's bower”

   “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: / Its loveliness increases; it will never / Pass into nothingness; but still will keep / A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”

3. A shady, leafy shelter or recess in a garden or woods.

   “[…]say that thou overheard'st us, And bid her steal into the pleached bower, Where honey-suckles, ripen'd by the sun, Forbid the sun to enter;[…]”

   “That night Tarzan built a snug little bower high among the swaying branches of a giant tree, and there the tired girl slept, while in a crotch beneath her the ape-man curled, ready, even in sleep, to protect her.”

   “The entire town mated together, in the leafy bowers that had sprung up among the washing-machines and television sets in the shopping mall, on the settees and divans by the furniture store, in the tropical paradises of the suburban gardens.”

   “The branches met overhead in a kind of bower and the three cops stood in the shade and studied the roughcast gable of the cottage, maybe fifty yards on up the hill.”

4. A large structure made of grass, twigs, etc., and decorated with bright objects, used by male bower birds during courtship displays.
5. A peasant; a farmer.
6. Either of the two highest trumps in the card games euchre and five hundred (where the joker is omitted).

   “Yet the cards they were stocked / In a way that I grieve, / And my feelings were shocked / At the state of Nye's sleeve, / Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, / And the same with intent to deceive.”

7. A type of ship's anchor, carried at the bow.
8. One who bows or bends.

   “The bower aims his display straight at the dominant figure, who may reciprocate with a milder version of the same action.”

9. A muscle that bends a limb, especially the arm.

   “His rawbone armes, whose mighty brawned bowrs / Were wont to riue steele plates, and helmets hew”

10. One who plays any of several bow instruments, such as the musical bow or diddley bow.
11. A young hawk, when it begins to leave the nest.

verb

1. To embower; to enclose.

   “O nature, what hadst thou to do in hell / When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend / In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh?”

   “[…]belts of thin white mist streaked the brown plough land in the hollow where Appleby could see the pale shine of a winding river. Across that in turn, meadow and coppice rolled away past the white walls of a village bowered in orchards,[…]”

2. (obsolete)To lodge.

   “Flora now calleth forth each flower, And bids make readie Maias bower”

name

1. A surname.

   “Snowdon climbed to the top floor of the house opposite George's in Pimlico to observe the artist in one window and his model, the painter Natalie Bower, in the adjacent.”