cowlick

4 7.3

A small patch of hair that grows in a different direction and sticks up

noun
/ˈkaʊlɪk/

: remolino

Despite his attempts to comb it down, his cowlick always refuses to lie flat.

They say it because they see a metal, circular metal piece of metal at the outer table of John Kennedy's skull near the cowlick.

Examples

Topping it off, Sawyer's perpetual cowlick stuck up like a tiny periscope.

Fiction book (1997)
Charly's cowlick swirled to the right, Molly's swirled left.

Fiction book (1993)
Yeah, even that little cowlick he has in his hair.

Barely Legal (2011)
Your hair would come back, same color, same cowlick.

The Atomic Cafe (1982)
Why didn't somebody tell me to get my cowlick down?

The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979)
AMANDA: I hate that cowlick.

The Glass Menagerie (1987)
A shy, dark cowlick crosses his forehead.

Academic text (2004)
I ran my hands through his hair and paused to finger the cowlicks growing against the grain.

Fiction book (1994)
The only noticeable differences between them were their cowlicks and their birthmarks, which made them mirror images of each other.

Fiction book (1993)
I don't have bangs and can't really because I have a cowlick in the middle of where bangs would be.

Blog text (29)

Surface Forms

cowlick singular

cowlicks plural

Morphology

cowlick = cow + lick (semi-transparent) = cow + lick

The components 'cow' and 'lick' are visible and historically explainable, but the specific sense 'tuft of hair' is not a directly predictable meaning for most learners.

Etymology

Cowlick comes from the simple image of cow + lick, because people once imagined a cow's lick, where 'lick' means 'to pass the tongue over', could leave a small patch of hair pointing the wrong way. So a cowlick is a little area of hair that grows or sticks up in a different direction, as if it had been licked by a cow.