See Dowsabel in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "Dowsabel was never a highly popular or widespread given name, but it enjoyed a modest window of genuine use in late medieval and Tudor-era England before transitioning entirely into an poetic vocabulary word.\nThe name originated as an anglicized phonetic spelling of the Latin given name Dulcibella, combining dulcis (\"sweet\") and bellus (\"beautiful\"). In late medieval England, it appeared sporadically in parish registries under variations like Dousabel, Dowzable, and Dussabel.\nIn 1593, Michael Drayton published \"The Ballad of Dowsabel\" within The Shepheard's Garland; and in the Comedy of Errors (c. 1594), William Shakespeare used it as an ironic moniker for a kitchen maid.\nBecause of its heavy usage in pastoral poetry, the name underwent a linguistic shift (anthimeria). By the mid-1600s, British English speakers stopped naming their children Dowsabel and instead began using the lower-case word dowsabel as a generic noun meaning \"sweetheart\" or \"lady-love\".\nBy the 18th century, the term became obsolete as both a name and a noun.",
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Download raw JSONL data for Dowsabel meaning in English (3.0kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-10-21 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-10-01 using wiktextract (c1bb342 and 6f96ddf). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.